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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE ANSWER REMAINS

The Princes Prance,
the Populace Dances,

But Nowhere Near
To them are Answers

 

 Falling Foul of Franchise

 At the activistic delusions that are speaking in our generation, we have been looking, pondering their content, scriptural depiction, rational emptiness and results.

What does this breed ? What does this delusion dynamise ? Let us consider it yet more broadly.

It leads to false pride of individuals, races, nations and for many, in the human race. It is precisely like being the son of a millionaire and imagining in your spirit and heart, that you are superior, have attained, and are of better structure. Many do and aren't.

Pride readily induces a competitive desire to show its imaginary wares, tout its flags and wave its hauteur. Again, they may desire to demonstrate that it is not false pride, and in the process, as in World War II, demonstrate that it is MORE than false pride: it is rampant folly.

It is not in spirit very different whether it be pride of race, of some culturally engendered religion, or culture that IS the religion, something to which it is far from impossible for a given nation to reach! Again, as with Islam, it may specialise in showing its power, intimidating its foes, invading its neighbours, viewing as calamity anyone in a given area, as Israel, even with its credentials for the same are millenia more than those of Islam (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, Divine Agenda Ch. 6, Highway to Hell).

Again, this pride of face, race, place may lead in the mistaken concept that somehow one, one's race or whatever, has ENGENDERED the superiority in mystic manners, that it is best for all if one's own nation has a regional presidency, such as Japan envisaged in her nicer representations at least, for nearby Asia.

It would, then, be GOOD at that time,  for China to be invaded ? Presumably, on that sometimes stated scenario, this was the delusive concept. When GOD is not in view, man often prefers to put himself in view, in religion, in the bases for a religion, in culture, in science or in some way or other which focusses the CREATURE and not the CREATOR, precisely as in Romans 1:17ff.. HE becomes the centre, autonomous, helped by cultural concepts which as it were, may ooze out of his spirit, and make a sort of sweet honey for desire to use in its flights of imagination, which readily become flights of hundreds of aircraft, just to implement the plan!

It was little different when there arose that perverse and degraded distortion of Christ's LORDSHIP, which Romanism has seized, as if via Peter who precluded ANY lordliness (I Peter 5), there were to come a stepping stone for the Bishop of Rome who became something called a pope, or father, though the term is strictly forbidden by Jesus the Christ (Matthew 23:8-10). The stepping stone is thoroughly stepped on, demolished in the misuse, and the words of Christ that His kingdom is not of this world, and that OTHERWISE His servants would fight (John 18:36), become an authority to fight, as Romanism did with papal troops and torturers, against their fellow men.

What then, yes means no, and the servant acts as if lord! and lord of Lords, the regime becoming its own autonomous power in the most dramatic and manifest sense, in defiance of strict instructions to the contrary (cf. SMR pp. 913ff.,  1032ff., 1046ff.). It was Philip Schaff who pointed out that it would seem obvious that there is a difference more than one of degree is BEING crucified and in CRUCIFYING others!

Such however is the delusive dynamic of the hallucinatory work which deceives mankind when he sets out to do what he wants, to follow that in which he falsely glories, that even contradiction of the LORD verbally acknowledged seems as if a mere flicker of light in the dark. Was it there ? Who knows! Let us proceed: this seems the way of it.

The same lust for England on the part of Spain in the Armada days, was in the setting of the spiritual fiefdom of Rome being set to become the victor over Protestant England, so that all might be in thrall. Instead, in that thing, so brutal to some, practical fact,  the Lord mightily intervened, a tempest greatly emphasising the English superiority in manoeuvrability, which was a testimony to liberty which moves in  very much the same way, as if a symbol, as the unwieldy galleons costing vast fortunes, where tossed away over the coasts of Scotland and on to Ireland; so that England was not subjected.

Whether Romanism, Islam, Fascism, Communism, they are all there to SHOW, and to KNOW and to DEMAND; but they have not worked, since when you fight God, it is too lopsided, since reality is always then a foe, since lies destroy the soul and maim the spirit (cf. Aviary of Idolatry, Highway to Hell).

It is not for want of trying, whether the pride be the offspring of the organic evolutionary myth, the racial one, the religious Romanist one, the Islamic one or any other. The ultimate may well be the HUMAN one, for it is in this that a MAN (as in II Thess. 2) imagines that he is God, and SHOWS himself that this is so, although the prediction is quite clear, the LORD will show him that it is not so, in his incineration. Pretence in theory and doctrine, whether from pseudo-science or elsewhere in philosophy, of which this is a noxious and deceptive part, together with pretension makes that brew which intoxicates; and intoxication throughout history has had its own reward.

God is not mocked (Hosea 9:7, 8:7, Galatians 6:7); but liberty in misuse has had several thousand years to make the point. Man is finding it hard to read, at this advanced stage, however!

The religion, humanist and secular, with mystic overtones and hilarious pomp, that makes itself an uncalled moral arbiter (for example, you may have sex with ANYTHING you like, and naughty and intolerant and in fact intolerable - later phase - are those who think otherwise, is its corrupted and corrosive call in principle, which is unprincipled), has this semblance of some marvellous, enlightened sort of liberty. You can do what you like, if you do not actually slay someone (at least not directly, forget about the slower things like AIDS); and there IS not moral right and wrong. Such is its message.

It is free, we are enfranchised! goes the chorus.

However this libertine style liberty has one very important exception. You cannot SAY what you like about the actions of those who DO what they like, irrespective of what is happening to the nation. Increasingly, the time is coming when you cannot disagree and state it is morally wrong, since it is already declared that it is morally right to do it, and morally wrong to say, think or reason otherwise.

An absolute command is this: DO NOT CONDEMN as evil, what the State has deemed good, and as to the State, it is the HUMANS who as such and by vote, can do and say ANYTHING. This brings on the comedy of errors itself. Thus in order to PROTECT people's liberty, they are allowed to do what they will in the moral realm, short of immediate injury. In order to SUPPRESS people's liberty, they are NOT allowed to voice dissent or issue a negative judgment orally, even though it is the same resource involved: PEOPLE. Tyranny dictates, truth becomes, as in Victoria (cf. News 156, Pall of Smoke ... Ch. 10), in salient phases, IRRELEVANT. You are free to follow the party line and not free to act and speak to the contrary: this becomes in salient respects too similar to the fouled nest of Communism!

Thus there is not only a matter of people involved; it is a direct tilt at God. If you follow the Bible and use it to judge cases, that is to be deemed foul, in the extreme case, to which many a society is quickly coming near. If you follow the Culture and judge cases (for example, judge that it is WRONG to condemn, and RIGHT to do this and that), this is good, and should be commended. The newspeak version of four legs good, two legs bad is this: DO IT, good, SAY it, bad! Freedom is dissected, desiccated, and in this dynamic, becomes dead as man can make it. God is the object of this assault as in Micah 3:5, Revelation 19:19.

Thus whether you are condemned or commended depends on one thing, what the government says, which means that this becomes an absolutist form of democracy, a tyranny, a totalitarian power, a religious ruler like the case of the Second Beast in Revelation 13:11ff., put in place by people, and differentiating between people, the goodies who do, and the baddies who say. The former have their liberty, the latter have it denied.

This is the very spirit of antichrist, parading, prancing, dancing its vicious ways with its own delusive dynamic, skipping form false premiss to false premiss, as if crossing a stream. It becomes more and more like the eschatological fix, provided in Revelation for all to see, before they see it in practical history. None can say this: We were never warned. You have, my friends, one and all had a structure giving warning for millenia!

Here then is a power, a developing power for man. It gives short shrift to any other, and especially to that of God. This is by various devices, to be disowned, chided, derided, smirked about, as if the Creator were the product, and the creature called man, the god! This topsy-turvy relationship is just one more step: you move in this way from perverse relationships, to inverse ones! It is all  of course part of the curse, since when people REFUSE the truth in this advanced social setting, it is an ACTIVE DELUSION (II Thess. 2:10) which they gain for their penny of philosophy, and to be inverted, diverted, perverted is all part of the comedy.

It is like that amusing TV comedy, The Plank, from Britain, when in a simple operation of bringing a plank from a timber-yard to a site, almost every kind of error, mischance, mischief and awkwardness possible, happens to produce what is a beautiful illustration of abandoning what is right, for what comes naturally!

The power then which in this diverted, perverted and inverted fashion comes to be regarded in modern man in more and more of his fashion shows and political mannequin parades, is coming to be regarded a one within himself. It can be mystic, New Age, Thought Transfer, Universal Thought or any other phrase, but it in man, is summed in him. He tries to WORK it!

He is arbiter, constructor, and architect. It is a dismissal of created status, one of the chief reasons for the adherence to the other comedy, that of organic evolution, and for the inversion concerning its relationship to scientific method, and that of creation. This has been pursued in the new volume, Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Form of Salvation, one providing some length and scope (between 400,000 and 500,000 words).

Thus in various ways,

bullet political,
bullet diplomatic

(as in the moral question of giving Most Favoured Nation treatment on the part of the USA,
to China despite its much attested abuse of political force as a ground for economic humiliation
in virtual slave labour of the most atrocious punitive kind, a reward for daring to speak freely*1),
 
bullet philosophic,
 
bullet pseudo-scientific inversion

and so forth:

man comes to seek first this.

It is to remove God, His words, His morals, His Creator's word, His Bible, His challenge, to ignore it or fight it as required from time to time, and to make Him seem unknown, or even unknowable. Unknowable was the Barthian substitute, but it fell with the rest in self-contradiction not unlike that of Kant; for if He is not known, how can you tell that this is He and that it is so. If the realm is secluded, search is precluded.

If He is outside your purvey, how can you investigate His region well enough to know the way it sits, its character, quality, nature, that it IS God and yet IS NOT knowable; for to know so much about Him, His limits, modes, degree of obfuscation and so forth,  is to handle His nature very knowledgeably indeed. Worse of course, Barth's trip*1A into nightmare theology, as in the virgin birth, assigning credibility to the orthodox phrase, while giving to it a new meaning: that God is gracious for example!

This is neither interpretation nor other than a new religion using an old one, by contamination. If GOD does not know what He is saying, how much less man. If God in what Barthianism deems "the Word of God" can't do better than that, we may be perfectly sure that man, infinitely less, is a hopeless lecturer to hear, a comedian, clown or drunkard in spirit, as indeed is the designation for such perversity, shown in Hosea 9:7! The structure of assault (as in Isaiah 8:20), is not a matter of flowing speech, but simple departure. With God, you take Him or leave Him; there is no change: and if you wish to take Him, there is a WAY, and that is Christ, and it is He who insists that every jot and tittle will be fulfilled, of that word which He endorsed, the scripture. (For detail in this field, see SMR Appendix D)

Moreover if the same Bible , insists with the utmost vehemence and vigour that these are INDEED the very words of God, that this is the book of the Lord, and that its words are indeed infallible and are indeed to be done, that God is indeed to be known, and that this is the POINT, to the extent that having such knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ whom He has sent is eternal life, and not having it is NOT (John 17:1-3, 12:48-50): then an 'interpretation' which in all points differs is simply a rejection. It has nothing to do with the Bible, or its Christ, whose words to this effect are enormously clear (SMR loc. cit.).

Thus such a new religion must stand on its own feet, and not use the feet of Him who died; and it must have its own christ, its own supernatural attestation, and not a mere philosophic muddle of internal contradiction joined to that of the text which, after all, even it deems closest to God, and that to the uttermost degree.

This phase of the folly of modern confusion and assault on the Bible is mentioned in passing, since this endeavour to make God unknowable, whether in Kantian philosopher, or neo-orthodox dilemma talk, is part of the necessary cultural modelling process, to prepare man in the last stage, for this assumption of divine power on his own part.

What is it that we find then ? It is  the HUMAN RACE God, investing it in ONE MAN, who is scripturally called "the man of sin." Already one can see the movement. Fifty years ago, the effort was to detach church-goers from the Bible, and make it a "witness" or some such thing to the word of God, which was ... something else, and not clearly known. Then when this is done, you don't have to worry about expressly contradicting what it teaches as bad enough to ensure hell, as good enough for pastors to PREACH! (the current case with some, in terms of I Corinthians 5:9ff., 6:9ff.)

If after all, you detach this or that aspect of the Bible in phases, then in the end you can TALK about it, but say the opposite, and the heavily sedated populace who foolishly accepted the former talk, may well accept the latter. Historically in fact, there are those who have done precisely this.

The character of such processes is treated in some detail in Lead Us Not into Temptation, especially in Chs.  4 with  10  - 11, and also in Separation 1997. .

Whether, however, it is to be via parodies

bullet of the Bible;
 
bullet of God, of His manifesting Himself in Christ, the express image of His person; or
 
bullet of truth, as if it were not there but still could be told, for example,
though it be maintained that it is not there or available; or
 
bullet of man, as if his inheritance of a programmatic precision marvel of miniaturisation
to engender his body while he waits (as a babe), were some kind of passport to power or glory,
or more express delusions -
like those of superior race, place, grace or mace, governmental grip or whatever,
or of needful power to protect your survival, and 'arrival'
for the sake of something new to come, for reasons not known:

it is all of the same kindred, family and genre.

 

 Falling Foul of Fact

 

It becomes, through delusion, confusion and irrationality, carefully culturally programmed through TV, academic degrees, radio and newsprint, through political decrees such as ours in South Australia concerning the assault on Christianity directly implied in the education department, and many other ingenious little ways and touches (such as 'churches' persecuting those who point our their errors, as was the case with this author): just one sort of a thing.

That, it is autonomy, with theological phrase-format, political, cultural or other. It takes on the form of a personal, human racial, national and then international, cultural autonomy. Man becomes the exponent of the automatic gear, and society instals it, and the politico-religious adversary comes to move it about. Autonomy ? it COULD seek comfort, but here it seeks power. That lust, even for the power of God is still moving men into space, into power over man, power for man, as if the divine prohibition were an invitation! (cf.  Psalm 115,    and see A Spiritual Potpourri, A and F Schools).

In our last two chapters, we studied in some detail, the pseudo-scientific side, as is further accomplished in the volume noted above, on scientific method. This then is merely one of the family of delusive dynamics, gradually making its own religious following, talking as in the Victorian Russell Report of the 1970s (treated in Lead Us Not into Temptation) as in the SA Circular to Principals (TMR Ch. 8), of its own prescriptive religion, which is IMPOSED quite simply. It is almost as if Rome's Vatican had suddenly taken up its quarters in Australia, under another name. This is scarcely, as a trend, at all surprising, since the unseating of Romanism is one of the clear prophecies on which we have dwelt previously*2 . Others now seem increasingly to direct in its place, and in its special field of interest!

What then of these developments ?

Disdaining data and deity alike, irrational, grasping for power, instead of taking place and grace from God, this dynamic of the devil*2A, as it ultimately becomes quite expressly, this rebellion without rationale, moves a triumph for the practice of propaganda, and seeks to construct an abyss for the preservation of truth, driving disciplines before it like geese before a fox. They move for it and work for it, for the spirit of delusion becoming rife, each can contort the other, till the sport becomes a sort of gymnastic display, often seen in universities.

The Darwinian grotesquerie, not that he invented it, but rather gave it a popular form, in its spirit of survival and strength and advance through self-selection, has given the more generic dynamic a fresh and equally delusive impetus, enough to occasion three volatilely vicious wars, and come near to the destruction of this world. But that ? in this delusive drama, it seems it does not matter. It is like some wild-eyes entrepreneur, sniffing millions, stopping at nothing, destroying any firm by financial devices, hostile take-overs or whatever, to get there first. He will win, he feels sure.

There was  world to seize, and many have tried. Now it is the universe, and the flair of the devil is strong on the earth, as it seeks its greater rewards. Think, said one school-teacher of a former vintage, to the author, think what it would mean, for us to have all that power! (that is, for mankind to have the little tiddly-winks called the universe) at option and command! The idea apparently was found virtually irresistible.

Create by survival and desecrate on arrival! this seems the watch-word, of the greatest piece of nebulous nihilism that one could well conceive. It is as if fantasy is irresistible, reason disreputable, and they reason their way to such conclusions as these in a blur of the exhaust of thoughts never specifiable, gaseous dreams, predictively described by the Bible as "great swelling words" and "pompous words" in II Peter 2 and Daniel 7: the former of the practitioners, the latter of the acme, the "man of sin" to come.

Hitler, Mao and Stalin have all rather recently 'had a go' as the Australian idiom has it; but what have gone, to use the term, have been millions upon millions of shot, tortured, deprived and disintegrating lives, amidst scenes of infamy that might well disgust the animal kingdom: for this, it is devilry. It comes now with a moral tone which is imported from the dismissed regions of religion, in order to give credibility to atrocity. It can, however, do nothing for rationality. The merely describable can become by a whisk of whit, the prescribable. Happenings do not create hallowing, nor do events issue prerogatives; but this new peremptory dictatorship creates command at will, for the thrill to the desires of the heart; but it pays the bill in the end.

 

 Falling Foul of Freedom

 

It is in this more general milieu that the ghastly defiance in pseudo-scientism, which it makes towards scientific method, all too readily becomes an evil agglomerate with pride and hate. Included in this, is that found in intolerant toleration, which despising truth, yet tells it, and assaulting it, yet cries,, 'Hear me, for I am tolerant,' even as it imprisons those it cannot tolerate, whose divergence from its dictation of morals it cannot abide.

Here lies the very acme of hypocrisy and the epitome of pride.

It is one in accord with the follies of the past, where so many real or virtual efforts were made in vain to 'escape God' and live it up, or down as the case might suggest itself to those concerned. Thus in SMR pp. 422Eff., a long list of a variety of such endeavours is presented, stretching from Plato (who had it better than most) to Kant, from Buddha to Hoyle, Aristotle to Bergson. An excerpt is provided in this note*3.

The history is long. The time to come is short (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). This is far from surprising, for nearly every conceivable variation on the unoriginal theme of seizing the reins from the Ruler, not in this case some blot on the totalitarian or philosophic landscape, but the one who made the landscape, terrestrial and celestial, has been made. They have made it with subtlety, with force, with militaristic hurrahs, with ingenious propagandas, with crass cries and pseudo-serendipitous calls, as from the days of Sennacherib till now (cf. II Kings 18:17-37). The lure of Lenin was not so very different from that of Sennacherib, nor less delusive, and if the destruction of Sennacherib came more quickly, than for the lords from Lenin, yet the principle and result is quite similar! *4

It is but a small step to the next phase:  a rubble and ruling rabble with cleavages from God in a newly disposed array on the old anti-God theme, so often disguised.

Such an invasion of man for mirage is both formidable, fashionable and focussed, with vast declivities like valleys through rock, added as now nation after nation grows unwieldly in morals, inept in grounding, vague in rationality and stirred in spirit in a vast rush of competitive seeking for glory, survival and power, amidst inane philosophies, and the foretold riot of ruined churches. HIS church however remains and is alive indeed! cf. II Thess. 2:4, II Peter 2, II Timothy 3, I Tim.  4, Matthew 24:32ff., I Thess. 4,  as Matthew 16 makes so clear, and as to it, it is as always founded on that Rock which is Christ Himself, God incarnate, the Redeemer foretold, sent, arisen, whose time of Return is near, as also foretold  (II Samuel 22:32, Psalm 62, Acts 1, 3:19-21, Luke 21:24, I Corinthians 3:10-11, 10:4).

The career of evil reaches, like many another career, its summit, which being an inverted sort of thing, is its abysmal depth. It takes a further step.

What is that step ? It appears clearly to be one to that mystic humanism which is to come, focussed in the 'man of sin' of II Thess. 2, as paralleled in Daniel 7, where man, indeed through a representative and very much in the drugged dynamic of ruling, sees in himself, very god!

This self-glorification of the creature, illogical from the start, is fantasy to the finish. Having first subverted much of science in its method, where relevant to the task, into pseudo-scientism, as the landing of the mighty onrush of ambition comes near, and using many parallel pre-emptive raids on righteousness, its evil dynamic takes many captive as it proceeds.

Moving many by empty talk and the foretold great swelling words of vanity, it makes them servile as Revelation 13 shows. Not that this is wrought by psychological manipulation alone; the prophecy is that amongst all the bestial hype, the worshipful stress,  financial MEANS to these ends will assuredly be in place, and we have earlier seen just how precisely in place they have been looming, to put themselves (cf. SMR 906ff., 967ff.). Control of finance is a means conducive to constraint in the presence of folly, as is the perversion of the instinct instilled into that creation, man, not only by reason, but by the actuality of his derivation. As with the hunger for nourishment, if you do not eat food, then you go for something else; and the results, of course, they show...

If anyone chooses this multi-lane highway to fantasy, that one will have a just reward, where the breach of justice will not remove the reach of justice (cf. Revelation 18:4; 19).

 

Falling Foul of Christ Jesus

 

Dance in delirium then, 21st century counter-Christ-culture, whether in or out of quasi-churches, prance in pride and then lance as you seize power for your little day (Daniel 7:25, Revelation 13, 17).

To be sure, it may feel rather humiliating to have your tactics and antics foretold by millenia; but then, the 'have a go' syndrome is there, the sense of power lust, of glory, of having it all, of being autonomous is all at work.

Wisdom is not, however, to let blood but to seek its cover, even that of Jesus the Christ who died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God (I Peter 3:18, Isaiah 53, Romans 3:23-27, Ephesians 2, Galatians 3 cf. SMR Appendix C, Chs. 5  -  6). Of shedding blood there is no end, but of securing cover by the divinely provided blood of the incarnate Word of God, made flesh that as flesh He might die to cover sin, there must be a beginning. For His part, it is finished; for the part of man, it must be taken, not merely as a glimmer on the horizon, like the Enola Gray, seen by some youngster before it struck, a shadow of death. It needs to be both seen and taken gladly, as a harbinger of life, as indeed an explosion of life that is total, harmonious, controlled and vital (John 10:10, 5:17ff.).

In this way, not to the puny and peremptory expressions of destructive power by the self-glorification of man, but to the peaceful expression of the constructive power of the Creator, whose we are, ourselves a construction far more ingenious than we or any system in operation can contribute: it is to this that we are to come ... one by one.

It is not only the Jew (Zechariah 14) who must come one by one; it is the Gentile as well (Galatians 3:26-28).

Sin is no more gentle with the Gentile than with the Jew, and considering the way in which Gentile nations have so often treated the Jew, it appears man is party to the concept of results of ruinous conduct; and though he has shown no small hypocrisy in using devilish means to attack misled Jewish people, there is an end. Justice, without mercy where mercy is peremptorily dismissed by man,  will have not an outing, not a day, but an impact which leaves that of any bomb dismissible by contrast. This is not fear but realism and necessity. The Gospel on the other hand provides rest from fear, for the fear of the Lord is clean (Psalm 19:9), and in its gift of grace, makes of the sins of man a contrast like that of the bottomless pit to the soaring majesty of the mountain peak.

It is most unwise to be off peak. Dance, prance and lance each other as you may, this is not the place nor is it the time for such antics.

Those agile antics ? They

bullet were predicted in Psalm 2,
 
bullet were fulfilled notoriously at the crucifixion, which in turn
was predicted similarly a thousand years before it happened, and
 
bullet are seen as a continuing phenomenon past that peak in that same Psalm 2.

The case as sketched in that Psalm, moves until it becomes necessary, as we see in Psalm 2:10ff., to warn those judges, those autonomous myths called modern man, in his clothes of rebellion and self-assertion in its most ultimate sense. The warning is clear and it is this:  that where mercy is scorned, or disregarded, justice still sits supreme over sin, rebellion and indifference. Its day comes, not in the mere abstract, but with that same Saviour who fulfilling all written came in mercy with the Gospel centring in His own substitutionary atonement for all who so receive Him, also fulfils what remains. What DOES remain is rebellion without truth, fiction without fact, unrealism without redress, and those who welcome the insufferable suffering of eternal shame, are warned notwithstanding. Perversity is a pose; truth will out.

Reality knows no check for being jettisoned, and only mercy is left; and as to that, it is channeled most precisely where the demands of justice are met to perfection (Romans 3:23ff.), and to expect to get water in the desert of rebellion when the channel has been constructed at infinite cost: this is not merely presumptuous, but ludicrous. Therefore read this Psalm 2, and consider well.

Then read Isaiah 53.

 

 

NOTES

 

*1 See News 37,  97,  98, and the references, found in the following excerpt from Pall of Smoke and Diamond of Joy Ch. 8.

It goes on. But Christ continues to empower His people, and in this confrontation which is coming,  one which in the preliminary build up in Communist countries,  has already actually come significantly in the last century, the pressure gauge rises ponderously.  Just peek at Russia and consider the Gulag Archipelago of Noble Prize winning Solzhenitsyn, before turning to Jung Chang and her Wild Swans (with the little point concerning Communism in her land, 'If this is paradise, what then is hell?'- cf. SMR pp. 652, 684, 725). The Afghan women might be moved to think towards such a point (cf. News 82).

 

*1A See Dr Cornelius van Til, in his work

Has Karl Barth Become Orthodox ? and in Christianity and Barthianism.

 

*2 See for example SMR pp. 729ff., 1060ff., Biblical Blessings Ch. 2.

 

*2A

See on this spirit of evil, Satan of obstruction, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 8.

 

*3 The Excerpt from SMR

 

                    EXTENSION E: ON GREAT BURIALS

  (cf. Extension D, pp. 422 A-C supra)

 

1. Short Summary on the Mesmerism of Monism

A short outline may help some here. Materialism, as often shown in this work, presupposes the validity of MIND which makes the THEORY that MATTER is of this and that kind, with this and that significance (e.g. all-there-is or whatever it may be that is proclaimed). Hence mind is the primary datum in view; and this is really dualism, in that both mind and matter are affirmed; but mind is affirmed surreptitiously, by smuggling in the concept, and since it is primary logically here, it is illegitimate smuggling.

Second, the concept of series, of events of which human events are merely a set, is itself a priori quite impossible. See here Ch. 3 on David Hume, infra. If all were simply series, then the VIEWER which, that, who ? ... says so is simply series. How does a series overview itself and all series in order to rightly proclaim what they are and what their significance is ? For such an action, you see substance, a coherent viewing whole which is and has a standpoint under the countenance of which all series pass in order to be evaluated as to their real significance. You need in short, a reality-meter. This overviewer, reality-meter, if simply series, would again simply (this is in order for the whole concept is simplistic) be doing its things, acting its series, which is quite different from putting a value and a reality tag on all series, including itself. (Cf. footnote references at 422G & 422J.)

The theory forgets its maker - man. He is implicitly elevated to the godlike position of KNOWING WHAT THINGS REALLY ARE, and indeed, whether they are things, and if so of what kind and of what significance. To reach absolute truth, however, you need to evacuate the very premises to which our materialist, monist preacher is assigning us, by an act of his will. Yet on this premise, there is no such place to go. Hence the theory is impossible. (Cf. pp. 299-308, 997-1002C, 1012-1022.)

Those are the first three reasons why the theory is simply a presumptuous piece of reductionist aberration, forgetful of its maker, and useless in what is made.

The next and the fourth reason is this. Matter is irrelevant to error. It simply does what it does, and its actions are noted. ERROR implies purpose, so that the actuality, the target, the attainment may be contrasted with the intention, the purpose. The term "purpose" applied to matter, is void of significance. The term "error" applied to matter is mere anthropomorphism, and irrelevant. Hence matter and man are as far apart as slavery and enterprise. To subsume both under one title is an abuse of words, functions and description. (Refer Index: Error.)

The fifth reason is this. We proceeded earlier to build up the concept of mind, matter and spirit. This occurred in Ch. 1, and was extended somewhat on pp. 348 ff., (1995 Edition). What these logically REQUIRE for their construction is worked out in serious detail, not in dilettante monism mesmerism. The LEAST productive CAUSE for all is itemised, and His name given. That argument remains, and any attempt to escape the already insuperable presentation on causality there (for it is shown to be integumental to speech and thought as such, so that its denial as objective removes the validity of both, and hence any ability to frame significant theories), is dealt with rigorously in Chs. 3, 5 and 10. The careless, carefree construction therefore of hypotheses which implicitly deny the conditions of their own discourse ... use what they abuse, or account causatively for the arrival of causation ... is merely of psychological interest. It has no place in logic; and so falls monism, materialism once more (cf. e.g. pp. 284-290 supra, 424 ff. infra). Indeed the crux of 'causeless' flux is that it is undifferentiable from non-existence (pp. 264-288 supra).

The sixth reason follows. Logical positivism, positivism in general is keen on talking of description, of what you find ... and on seeking to bury the fact that the person with procedure who is doing the "finding" is ... there! Description requires one to describe. If ALL IS DESCRIPTION, if we know ONLY what we describe - a sort of experientialism aligned with method - then the theory is necessarily false. The reason ? Submerged assumptions ("we", "know", are antecedents in all this) ! Not only that, but because it contradicts itself. The theory that all is so, is itself not a description of anything perceivable, unless a wallowing in the pure and unordered subjectivity of what is currently flashing on the mental screen. Even that however does not include what everything else is! Further, description is not prescription or proscription, ideas are not ideals, eventuation is not obligation and the resistance to such realities is not observation. Such reductionism is like a two-dimensional model of a four-dimensional fact - except that they do not blend. The trip back from theory to fact is like a move from stage and scenery... to actors. They relate , but what they are in concept is not at all what they are in proximity: close (cf. p. 416 supra)! They are not only diverse, but divergent.

In short, if all is description, then the theory to this effect is not; so that if the theory is true, the theory is false. Similarly if etiology (the constraint of causal interaction) is false, so is the reasoned, cause-conceived statement that says so. In effect, man in a sort of lunar madness from time to time would dismiss causation causatively, insist and rely on description, undescriptively, irrationally "legislate" out God despite the irreversibly necessary results for man and the universe, in their witness to their Creator-origin; and then magically instil (install ?) himself or his people as a race into the negated post of interpreter, and take up the reins again as a causally reasoning person. Having dispensed with God by one device - the chaotic courtmartial of causality by causal thought - man would use the same (contradiction of reason and of all causation) to implant and establish himself (herself ? ...): on nothing. (Cf. pp. 264-269, 284ff., 313, 424ff. infra.)

Then, having defied logic, to evacuate 'god', our fine friend uses it for himself and his own convenience. For now there appears 'out of the blue' one who having defied logic, would use it to add to the logical pandemonium. Our human god may then selectively dispense with reason (oh yes! often for reasons, and always with the language which presupposes and uses it), in a grand sweep, like a political dictator. Having come "in" on one platform, this potentate, this micro-missionary would act on another... then flit a bit.

In fact, there is an end result, and Paul delineates (II Thessalonians 2:4-12). For this, the preparations are painfully obvious already, as a new East-West religious synthesis (cf. pp. 999; 866ff. infra) prepares for a political ventriloquist to " listen" ... and speak!

Such is modern religion in many of its phases, correctly prophesied as a matter of having "itching ears" (II Timothy 3:7-8, 4:1-4), a significant spiritual slab of the populace "turning aside to fables"; and what more so than the suspension of reason in order to interpret by reason.

It really is a waste of time to deal with irrational rubbish as we consider in this sixth point; but since some fall into that pond, it can be helpful, despising the flesh in the sense Jude has, with compassion, to send in a rope as we are doing here. Detail, further elements and development are found in Ch.'s 1, 3, 4, 5 and 10 of this work.

The seventh reason in our series on this topic of monism ? In a "flux" or surveyable concourse of inter-related components, not merely is there no absolute (cf. pp. 254-255 supra); there is equally no independent person. The search for the "meaning" in such a poignant position is a priori, by virtue of these assumptions, a search for what (in that case) is not there. (Cf. pp. 264-290 supra.)

Subjectivity is de rigueur. The subject is subjected, intercepted, inter-active: sequenced not sovereign; submitted, not in autonomous composure; overseen by events, not lord of them; of them, not over them. Fragmentary persons, in line with the monistic hypothesis, react, experience, adjust; have esoteric "meaning", desires, frustrations, short-term expedients, preferences ... but the actual meaning ? There is no adequate Being, in this model, to give it. 1

Man "dies" by hypothesis! The death is still unpleasant, unnecessary and a testimony to man's spirit: albeit one that moves to pity (cf. pp. 348 ff.). THAT in turn is a testimony to God (Ch. 1 supra), who is avoidable by will (for a time); but not by reason.

 

2. Intellectual Escapism and the Mesmerism of Modern Monism

It is always of great interest to witness the detailed character of the avoidance techniques practised by man towards His Almighty source, sponsor and Creator, through the Ages.

A "grow your own" immanentalist "god" hidden away conveniently, and in some way, perhaps, controllable in some "medium" or other, is a multiple-use method. It has proved extremely popular both in philosophy and "religion".

Thus Descartes had a method-god, implacably releasable in the program which, with very much the same omissions as in the illusory intellectualism of the "Big Bang" (which one ? their name is legion) ... led on to the cosmos by the serious-minded steps of a grave fairy tale. Bergson far later had a vital-force god, secretly assigned to the tissues of delightful life, another drop-in. Of course we must carefully distinguish between the name and the function of a "god". The term is apt where the function is performed, though it is not always used, possibly for some form of convenience ... In fact, each of these simply trifled with aspects of the creation - its government on the one hand, and its power-design elements, on the other.

The latter obviously fascinates men like Professor Fred Hoyle who, perhaps, influenced Paul Davies, both being keen on the design elements also. Davies (cf. Ext D supra) simply invents an implausible and, as we have shown, both unnecessary and impossible physics base for it, while Hoyle with no less virtuosity, has space intelligence(s) as the source: but how does that cause itself in this domain ? or how does it achieve componential status in the system: itself a greater prodigy than the creation! (Cf. pp. 332E-G, 315A-316G, 80, 20-28, 80-85, 121, 131 supra.) Even less conceptualised, the almost Buddhistic view (q.v.) of Davies shuts any ... god up into a sort of physics equivalent of the "roaring silence" (cf. pp. 1008-1113 infra, and Hindu correlatives, 996-999) where the poor ... component is confined, as if in prison.

Named or unnamed, yet the "god" - the operative functionality who makes the intelligent, creative, multi-mode, imaginative, correlated, contrived design input (acknowledged at all, indeed, or not) has a hard time of it. It is rather like Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask (*1), a confinement of the contained dangers of reality.

God, however, is no subject of man's intellect in ways contrary to causality; He is not inbuilt into the furniture of the universe which depends on Him. The obfuscatory follies of all Monism (cf. Index and supra) like the necessities of logic (Chs. 1, 3 supra, 5, 10 infra), the robust realities of reason, the inevitable compelling of causality, extinguish such very convenient confinement of the God with whom man has to do.

Just, however, as biology (in the time of Western dreamland) breaks its wings on its self-imposed cage of chance, inventing abrupt creation as if at last challenged by the facts into schizoid submission to some of them, while waving the flag of Empire convulsively, on ground no longer even NOTIONALLY there: so now a school of physics would have god-in-a-medium. The former grasps seemingly hysterically at the facts, for so long in so much overlooked (cf. Professor Løvtrup, 252A-C, Dr W.R. Thompson 199 ff., Professor Heribert Nilsson, pp. 109-111, and 315 ff. supra), while idolising an incompatible theory; the second pines reverentially at an irrational theory, without noticeable concern about the facts. Neither the history of science, scientific method, the strictures of causation, constantly employed in all discourse nor the actual macrocosmic findings seem sufficient to restrain uninhibited extrapolation in defiance of all logic, all system and any need. Need however ?

Somewhere to bury Him, historically(*2) that is the need. It seems to impel and propel past all reason. Indeed, it has been the question ever since the crucifixion: Where to bury the body of truth; as earlier (John 11:42,48) how to mask His almighty power, a desire still relentless after His resurrection (Acts 4:25).

It never changes.

God however as we have shown, is competent, eternal, non-self-contradictory and as such the unique purveyor, the Creator of the universe - not a component of it; and has a face that must be faced, despite the crucifixion, and cannot be buried away, the bodily resurrection of Christ detailing the ... difficulty, just as reason systematically has required that it be so. No mere essence, no chaotic confluence of contradictories, no quietus for sidestepping causation, He cannot be distilled or instilled. He made distillation, as logic warrants, the logic used by those who would wish to escape it.

Aristotle put 'god' into something like a cage of (untouchable) contemplation; Plato into forms without creative power - though he had flashes of insight; the Romanists have a wafer for Him (cf. pp. 1046-1053, 1086-1088D infra); Darwin had a Cheshire cat smile residue for Him, evanescent amongst the "real" action; Freud an unconscious for His confines and Marx a class-clash directorate for His time, though failing to acknowledge the directorate that programmed all this.

Time ? Davies seems almost to have time for "god", or the criterion of understanding man. In his About Time, he avers: "Elucidating the mysterious flux would, more than anything else, help unravel the deepest of all scientific enigmas - the nature of the human self", as he looks at man playing a part in "the great cosmic drama". Indeed, he seems to feel time can go either way:

Try, however, reversing it when you're killing a rooster (cf. pp. 882-884 infra) ... or have just done so.

In fact, whether they be economists, chemists, physicists or others in philosophic mode, the utterly ludicrous becomes 'natural' and 'obvious', as the normal specialist-without-God syndrome drives mind to imagine what reality fails to connive with. Political philosophers do it with the blood of millions; others merely do it to the mind of the modern youth, inculcating without logical premises, their positivistic jet-propelled substitutes of stagecraft for acting.

Thus the spirit of man, in these very exercises, denies what it is and who of necessity constructed it, while as a component, 'declaring the truth' . This it does, as if being lost in the immensity of elements gave ground for gaining sight of what it is that is lost. This, however, demonstrably relates by contradiction - in the milieu of multiplied components - to its stage and setting 2 .

Indeed, does eventuation ... mean ?

The Davies-type normal smuggling-suppressing syndrome - it is not the purpose but the product to which reference is made - what is it ? It is a case, ideationally, of popping some kind of something into an all-encompassing monistic continuum, variably constructed; it has obvious appeal to some. It seems to give to many physicists a pleasure (like a keyboard to an intellectual computerist - the sense perhaps of having it all "there"), so that it can become an hypnotic substitute for living in reality, a subsuming of the real status of the wholly independent GOD into a nice, manipulable form which has interest ... but no command! You might question that.

Is it manipulable ? Yes. For although there are some limits to the attitude of someone at least using physical reality as a starting point for speculation, yet these are his/her own limits, for in the making of theories and their rebuttal there is almost no end. The history of philosophy shows that. Idiotic substitutes for the true God are one of the chief employments of philosophy, which, while it has other and sometimes reasonable uses, has a service to perform for a rebellious race. Thus, whether they be Christian or other, thinkers regularly show the error of predecessors, but someone will constantly come up with some other error. In the interims, some try to live apart from God with a semblance of non-irrationality. However, in fact, what is new ? The Davies approach is merely one more impossible section of the smuggling syndrome. As shown in Adelaide University, moreover, even students will flee from facing the facts, when given the opportunity in an available medium. The truth is by no means desired by many; and for this we mourn.

Such things, however, are in the hands of God, and we continually offer the truth, and opportunity for it to be "overthrown" by the current devotees of the latest in speculative escape. There is no escape; and a quarter of a century of dealing in this area continually shows in practice, what is asserted by faith, with the unending accompaniment of reason. And thousands of years have a like testimony (cf. pp. 882-884 infra).

 

3. The Futile Burial - in the Scenery, while the Scenario goes on ...

An important emphasis remains ... It is this. Davies refers to "time" as if it were some kind of sovereign and magisterial entity which could give meaning to the human race. When, he says, we know what that is, then to man we can look, what he is.

Is this so ? Of course not! Time is merely one of the numerous elements of inter-relating functionalities that relates to the composed universe platform on which man sits, currently rather like a volcano, with eruptive force. Not all are in this degenerative phase; but it is culturally acceptable. IF one knew ALL mysteries about real relativity, the ultimate, the final word of what relates to what in the field of law-composed elements of the physical reality, one would be an expert craftsman indeed; but nothing more.

One would not even then have so much as touched the character of man. His environment at the least of levels would be known; but neither the interstices of his mind nor the quality and calibre of his spirit. The latter in whole and the former in substance will not and can not be known (they indeed relate) until their design is realised. THIS can never be understood at all, until their DESIGNER is known. THAT can never be done until one repents of one's sins and receives not a mere intellectual remedy (we die of these pretences constantly in politics), but a spiritual one, that covers the spirit and invests the mind of man.

What then is needed in order to understand man is his Creator. Those who wish to bury the same in the muck of mere intellectual rovings (or at times, alas in the history of philosophic, ravings), have then NO POSSIBLE WAY of understanding.

What is it like ? It is like some spoofed psychologist, hypnotised by his/her own specialty (alas another specific of guideless humans), trying to "analyse" out the precise reason - tooth-ache was one suggestion - for genius or other psychic phenomena. Looking among the props, such "philosophers" are merely besotted with their specialties, roving into fields they do not understand, imagining the REAL role of an actor is the stage scenery, or the platform or the lighting equipment: haplessly immune to reality.

When we REALLY understand these, they say, then the actors and the play will be clear. "Time" will tell, says Davies. Wonderful stuff! says an admiring archbishop or some such dignitary! So it is that prophecy is fulfilled, and the "falling away" (q.v.) helps itself to the race, the human race, become so inhuman, as in so much else, so inhumane: denying its form and losing its life.

To the race ? It is not all in this plight. It is still possible, in the grace of God, at the instance of His loving kindness and in the movement of His hand, to come to the One who in Himself has the answer to the partial, bespectacled, blinkered race which wanders with such zeal, and at time such venom, from what it is, while engagingly or sadly making such earnest endeavours, without the truth, to find something that will do.

It doesn't; it never did; and it never could.

Let us summarise a little. God then has many muddled, quasi-suppressants and smugglers (suppressing as they smuggle, smuggling 3 as they suppress - cf. Romans 1:18-21).

 
bullet Aristotle hid "Him" in a contemplation casket, untouchable, untouching;
 
bullet Plato (q.v.) in forms, archetypes with occasional glints from beyond;
 
bullet Kant (q.v.) hid "Him" in the unknowable noumena, about which he was so knowledgeable ...
 
bullet Bergson (q.v.) in vital force (living what ? "force" accelerates matter, but bears no mind - see 'Potential');
 
bullet Davies seems to act similarly with - a vanishing god, as if disassembled - in the multi-faceted monism,
which he inspects like a doctor, to see if perchance dissolved mind
is somehow secreted in the self-contradictory "it"
(pp. 252A-N, 263-270, 284-297, 300 ff, supra; 422Q-W, 425 ff. infra); while -
 
bullet Buddha (q.v.) seems as if he really wants to forget "it" (cf. pp. 996-997, 999 infra);
in this, being like a primordial version of ...
 
bullet David Hume (q.v.), who for his part proceeds without subject, cause or ground for his "description only", contradicting both his criterion and his results with his procedure. So -
 
bullet Hoyle* (q.v.) more consistently put "it" into the system's innate 'intelligence' bureau,
complete with virtual information library.

But of this nexus, the composer and the cause ? He merely removes the necessities one step, in transit to God.
(Cf. pp. 127, 225-226, 112, 207, 80, 302 supra.)

Attributing to the universe a facility it does not manifest,
he ignores the demands of the creative action it incorporates.

(Cf. pp. 80-88, 121, 131, 252C-N, 265, 293-299ff., 313ff. supra.)

The collation of results however with causes (Ch.1 supra) inexorably (Ch. 3)
leads to God, the God of the Bible (Chs. 1, 10).

 

§ For more on this, see the section at  SMR pp.  422Eff.,
and on materialism see Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

 

*4

An excerpt from SMR pp. 926ff, with what follows, speaks for itself! To it is conjoined a slightly more recent item...

The State with its powers of oppression was 'scientifically' sure to wither away with the 'heaven' of no class conflict (whatever the actual 'classes' (*12) may have been in personality, morals and faith - all of which vary enormously in a given income group or even profession). This 'heaven' was to unfold itself by allegedly scientific processes. Come ? come it would with the inevitable power crunch of a grandiloquent Communism, fated to come, with no 'fate', on its own basis, to make it do so!

Did 'it' come ? Small wonder the foul three, Marx, Lenin and Engels are called 'the three dishonoured prophets' in Nicolas Rothwell's article, 'The Facts Crawling Out From Under Russia's Secret Rocks', in The Australian, October 19-21, 1991.

Less wonder still when even Tass, the official Russian newsagency, is reported in The Times, January 1992, as acknowledging that nearly 4,000,000 people were prosecuted for 'counter-revolutionary activity' in the period 1921-1954, with over 3 millions sentenced to death or sent to prison or camps for up to 25 years... the article continuing to note that estimates of 'those who lost their lives as a direct or indirect result of Soviet communism - including collectivisation and the famine that followed, enforced industrialisation and the camps - range from 25 million to 40 million.'

In fact, the oppression and size of the Russian State police, informers, intruders, officials, KGB and all the types and brands of manoeuvrers, torturers, psychiatric manipulators and the rest has appeared quite unprecedented, as if to anti-fulfil the prediction on something near the vastest scale imaginable. What nation has specialised more in the instruments of oppression than this one, under this atheistic management! Solzhenitsyn is merely one of its testifiers (*13)! The prophecy is not only unfulfilled; the exact opposite has not only come: it has come with a vengeance which, the gruesome apart, would qualify as comic...

The true ruler of the nations has allowed, in His wisdom, a colossal and comic irony to occur - the 'liberators' are the worst oppressors of all (though it is to be acknowledged, their 'glorious' system has had South-East Asian and Asian followers who may yet surpass their Russian prototype in massive cruelties, giving further testimony of the wonders which Communism can perform before our very twentieth century eyes)!

That this farce has been preached as a twentieth century 'gospel', complete in China with obsessively present loud-speakers blasting the ears of the victims, perhaps lest thought had time to cerebrate: that is almost as devastating a critique of the follies of the mid-and-late twentieth century trends of the human race as any. Here again is brisk and vigorous verification of the Biblical predictions that, in the deteriorating times to come, many would be turned to fables (II Timothy 4:4). FEW MORE MACABRE FABLES, more sombre flirtations with fancy HAVE EVER OPPRESSED THE HUMAN SPIRIT; and it is no small phenomenon, but has governmentally CAPTURED IN CHINA ALONE, AROUND 1/4 OF THE EARTH'S PEOPLE! That Biblical fulfilment is massive ...

On the contrary such a 'theoretical' and 'scientific' result is not even in the direction of the Marxist predicted trend. A cry, thought or protestation of 'calm' is Biblically predicted and this before the eyes of the world (1 Thessalonians 5:3), and first Krushchev and now Gorbachev allow the sight of some of the Communist realities, so often researched before, to be made plain to all. It was a tornado of oppression which this wonderful and liberating system of peace procured. Its devotees, for example in the Red Army, a place not without significance, are still not without some means of provoking or precipitating peril, while putsch and counter-putsch is contemplated or conducted.

Even yesterday (January 1992), the news report was to the effect that Russia is not the sole repository of nuclear power in the former U.S.S.R., and so many reports, now this, now that, indicate the strain, the stress, the complications, combinations and surreptitious preparations that desire may form, with means at hand.

Nevertheless, now that Yeltsin tells the world from Russia, that the missiles are being trained away from the U.S.A., enemy no longer [and so helpful as it is with food], a cry of peace, End of Cold War, of hope arises! A delusive interim is predicted Biblically, only to be ruptured by the realities of unbelief which war on peace, and procure slaveries to sin: political, social and military. ''They shall not escape!''

 

From Red Alert ... Ch. 6, comes the next item in the sequence:

Devious intrigue, with integrity at a minimum, courage low, daring high, or using suicidal persons, like the 19 year-old profiled in one magazine, who IN ANY CASE appeared to find life not worth living and find a 'glory' resolution in death a good thing: these things do not need terrorist examples to expose them. Such however DO undoubtedly highlight the condition of the human heart. With some it is mere pride, an insistence on appearing great, or competent, noteworthy, by wealth, by tongue, but position, by influence. With others, it is manipulation which appeals, as perhaps with Lenin, exposed in the Kremlin openings of Gorbachev, as perhaps the least Communist of them all.