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JOYFUL
JOTTINGS, NEWS AND CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS
5 - IN THE STEPPES LEADING TO THE END
OF THE NINETEEN HUNDREDS
Yes, they've been around a long time. Electricity bursts into fuller use, cars grow from luxuries of the rich to implements of the norm, telephones popularise themselves, electric appliances proliferate, labour saving devices merge with political devices, so that the empowered mob may be menaced by the empowerers, the giant government combines which watch statistics and play games, and war games, and work at war, and ruin things they create, and savour idiotic ideologies, which must be treated with respect and preferably awe, until they are found, as was from the first obvious, plain awful. That was painful, then they try another. They are never satisfied, since what is satisfactory, the truth, is ipso facto unacceptable. Hence the delusions, confusions and obfuscations of the twentieth century continue according to plan. There is a plan. It is being fulfilled, as one finds by simply reading the Bible and the news. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, SMR, Ch.8.)
It has been a century, in other words, of
follies on the one side, where faith on the other, has been more and more
evident as a contrast, as at the first times. No more is the
The world wheels and deals, millions perish
while diplomatic gestures are made by the U.N., or wings beat in frustration
from NATO, or Communists too powerful to be treated like South Africa do worse
things with comparative impunity, while most favoured nation status becomes
meaningless for the US, but not for China. Meanwhile, with such international
blessings, commerce drives its sabred teeth into the flesh of the afflicted and
the sufferings in regimes which, according to report, can with facility help
themselves to
The century has been crippled with contrivance, but faith shines as ever; and the more brightly in the gathering darkness of the steppes, so flat and virtueless in so much, with so few mountains and heroes being no longer the mode. (Cf. The Weekend Australian , p.20, May 15-16, Shelley Gare - "Come Back, Heroes, All is Forgiven"). The steppes which, increasingly flat, lead to the new millenium are traversed in growing cold of heart. Anti-heroes, anti-moral figures luxuriating in lust, hate, killer-joy, victory without righteousness, fulfilment without point or meaning: these with the disjointed, the disastrous, the malady-ridden minds from kids to the aged, are portrayed on the TV, de rigueur in the literature, become the popular fare to strike the heart, fortify the will, move the thoughts of our decaying century. It is like having bacteria, minus food, all by themselves, for lunch.
Virtue is loved like a raving murderer;
integrity is desired like yesterday's wash-up water, left in the sink. The
disgusting rules, the age gapes at folly, drifts like a row-boat before
It has however also been a century of
enormous works of endurance and tremendous works of faith.
The word of God remains, the Kingdom of God is
unchanged, the truth of God is immovable, the prophecies of the Bible transmute
from word to fact, like a growing plant, about to bloom, in the return of
Christ, quite as assured as His first coming, which led to His death at the
long predicted date (SMR pp. 886ff.;
cf. I Peter 21:23-25, Acts 1:11, Luke 21:28, I John 3:1-3, II Peter 1:19-21).
The fact so well put by Shakespeare, that more is wrought by prayer than this
world dreams of, continues to be a fact, despite so many tightly closed eyes.
The roar of the approaching tornado is being
heard even by the deaf, and the joy of the consummation is approaching like an
express train. Now is the time for faith to flourish, for pretence to lose its
opportunistic role, and for the naked realities of the ways of the Lord to be
exposed to all flesh (Isaiah 40:4-5 cf. Daniel
The return of the Jews to
their land is one of the great divine sanctions in an unbelieving world; their prodigious success in battle another of the
predicted criteria of the approaching return of the Lord (Zechariah
Helpless forms of pseudo-Christianity flourish,
It is description by opposites. Obedience
becomes like a religious emetic to many, and the whole idea of there being a
God who has said, who has spoken, who has clearly written directions is being
rejected while existential, subjectivistic flourishes are married to corrupted
behaviour (Matthew 28:19-20, II Timothy 3). Humanity, like the case in Ezekiel
28:17, is more and more conspicuously being "corrupted ...by reason of your brightness". It is tragic.
It is not DESPITE its deficiencies but
THROUGH its efficiencies that the race is going that long but easy way to hell.
Few they are, as Christ has said, who find the straight and narrow way (Matthew
In engineering, reason is necessary, yes ? Why ? Because it will not work otherwise, than in the researched realities, which must be understood; just as it must abide in science, needed in practice if things are to function; as in mathematics, naturally, since error is not appreciated. But leave the toys and come to the truth, and what then ? Deal valiantly with the whole range of logic and proceed fearlessly in the whole scope and dimension, with reason, and what then ? Then, in the bulk supermarket culture of the Age, then ?
Why then, it is convenient, and not desired; and meanwhile, like a husband who wishes to lose all thought whatsoever of his divorced wife, reason is treated as a non-thing, and relegated - naturally in what is still called truth! - to the domain of that which is not. So nothing made it! They have it made! There is nothing in it. But they are in it; and cannot get out of it by sleight of the intellectual hand.
Weak as Autumn leaves, psychedelic philosophy colours them, for they are a multitude who so conduct themselves; and fall is their end, fluttering to the mud, scarcely noticed.
How truth can truly be said not truly to exist is a mystery for the arbiters of destiny who constantly are pressing the wrong buttons in our globe; and how they can truthfully tell us what it truly is without it is a great abyss and cancer; but evidently they like to invent insoluble mysteries by avoiding the truth, and the confusion of face and folly of mind which results seemingly titivates where truth once ruled.
Truth's
majestic certainties remain all-answering (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5,10); but these, they are not desired. Except by
a few; for few they are who enter into life (Matthew
THE VICE OF VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE VIRTUE OF REALITY
Man is coming to love more and more his
computer games. Long they have been in the mind; now they flourish in actual
impressions on the computer screen, screaming with violence, teeming with
blood, so that the young may begin to ? feel ... their way into a real world
where the delusive insinuations of virtual reality may have free play. Thus can
the Scottish and
The dream, perhaps aided by hallucinogenic drugs, can thus play itself out where years of anguish if not agony, on the part of victims, can cry out, in pangs and pain, and grievously illustrate to the virtueless, the virtue of truth. If they will hear ...
In this vein, consider Proverbs 1:20-33 - one of the most
evocative passages in the Bible, most arresting, poignant - and it is so
salient, we must put it in red, contrary to our 'blue quotation' procedure:
"Wisdom calls aloud outside:
She raises he voice in the open squares...
She speaks her words:
'How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity ?
And scorners delight in their scorning,
And fools hate knowledge."Turn at My rebuke,
Surely I will pour out my spirit on you:
I will make my words known to you."Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and one regarded,
Because you disdained all My counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
I also will laugh at your calamity,
I will mock when your terror comes,
when your terror comes like a storm,
and your destruction like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you..."Because they hated knowledge,
and did not choose the fear of the LORD,
they would have none of my counsel,
and despised my every rebuke:
therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own doings,
and be filled with their own fancies;
for the turning away of the simple will slay them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them.
But whoever listens to Me will dwell safely,
and be secure, without fear of evil."
Ponder this,
along with Isaiah 48:18:
Oh that you
had heeded My commandments!
Then your peace would have been
like a river;
And your righteousness like the
waves of the sea...
Time through the grace of God, is extended with
patience (II Peter 3:9); but it is not forever provided for malicious
madness, based in schools teaching folly by compulsion, as in South Australian
evolutionary dictatorial direction.
BUT REALITY IS NOT VIRTUAL. IT IS VIRTUE
IN REALITY, NOT VIRTUAL REALITY THAT IS NEEDED!
THE PLAY OF WORDS AND THE WORDS OF PLAY
Some will cry at educational techniques,
means of impact, efforts to attract the unfeeling to reality from their fancies
and fantasies, saying: YOU PLAY WITH WORDS, you employ rhetorical devices. It
is just as in the days of Jeremiah. ANYTHING is detestable which brings back to
reality. In reality, it is misuse of
rhetorical devices, making the playful work as if it were serious, it is logical errors wrought by illegitimate means which are to be watched
for; not means which can enliven discourse and alert thought.
No, not rhetorical devices (like inversion or
emphases in sentences, say - Richly went the lords to their doom,
instead of , The lords went richly to their doom, or These men, they
go, rather than, These men go ...); it is not these, but illogical
devices which are the problem. Sometimes streamlining of phrases can awaken,
but the logic remains. Thus: What is the cause of causality? - this, it is not
an irrational flourish but a consistent insistence that issues must be faced.
If in the word 'causality', one conceives the thought that what is, has a
background, basis, a reason, that irrationality is not the rule, that nothing
is not the basis, that contradiction in terms is not the course of reason, then
it is quite in order to ask -
What is its cause! It is only benumbing
convention which can object, for it wishes to invalidate the asking of
questions, and to arrest the pursuit of problems, to kill off creativity and to
judge system. Let it try this in any other area of life and it will merely lose
force, power to operate. Here, however, it is merely the pursuit of reality -
hence by the wayward, it must be dismissed by irrelevant abuse, lest one be
forced to think. In the end, however, causality is either an illusion or
a fact, a fiction or a fetish.
If it is real, then does it operate ? Assuredly. Without it there is no science, no mathematics, no understanding, no ability to operate in any sphere in a fashion of progress and cohesion, advance and linkage, comprehension and power (cf. SMR pp. 3-10). Why then is this underlying logic the case ? What would have made it so ? Assuredly not its opposite, that is, chance, the concept of abrasive uncertainty. If THAT were the basis of things, then reason would be an intruder, and thus its results would be exhibited as vain, futile and a fiasco. The opposite is the case. Even the irrationalist argues with reason for his view, so invalidating it by assuming the opposite for his own procedure, to what he affirms for his world view.
In fact, it is not possible at all to operate without it, when you come from the proud flesh of imagination to the workable world of what happens. You cannot even consistently STATE, then, a view, for that would imply the logical realities of concept-symbol correlation, that speech in organised form and rational inter-connection is valid, that it is part of the investigating technique which can be tolerated!
The cause of causality then is a proper question. It is just that the only answer is a solution undesired by the haters of that virtue. This solution is one which has both the knowledge, consistent and comprehensive, of reality and the power therefore to live in it meaningfully.
The only answer is simple.
It is a sufficient cause, since what is insufficient is by definition the denial of reason, of which above. What is sufficient to imbue the universe with reason ? What can impart what runs at one level, and thinks at another, the two interlocking harmoniously ? Man does not create it, for long before him, it operated. Man does not even create the technical instrument which handles it, his own cranial and spiritual equipment. He does not even know HOW!
He merely snips about with the DNA which has already been imparted.
The injection of reason into a system, both physical and of thought, requires its possession in the first place, and its expression in the second, and hence creativity and lucidity, plus that power of comprehending impartation which can conceive of a sphere and furnish it with its ingredients. It needs that technical finesse which can throw off a world and make its criteria coherent, its systems integrated and its populace of many kinds and degrees. Creative imagination no less than engineering skill and mathematical masterpieces of a type still humbling to man, these are inherent in his world and his mind. The procedures of matter and the capacity to survey the causality-activating, bonded series of events in space and time, logically require the immaterial, the spirit to make the one, and to invest at our successive causal level, the other, that either may exist.
God is the name, and the Creator is the title. It is necessary. It is inevitable. As soon as you look within the mind of man for the cause of causality, which preceded it in time, then you are in addition to being too late in time for your hypothesis, involved in further troubles which nothing can solve. If causality is a mere invention, or consequence of man's mental habitat, then the power to reason so is at a stroke invalidated. What is invalid cannot reason to show what is the nature of invalidity. If on the other hand, causality is objectively true, then what is shown thereby, indeed the ONE so shown, has the power to be right, so that this, what is right, may indeed be sought by following it. This, as shown so simply in Ch.1 of SMR, is ineluctably*1, God the Creator.
Put differently: If you are trying to account for the process of accounting for things, then the moment you postulate something alien to it, to 'create' it, find some ‘non-causal base’ to do this, you violate your own premiss.
Why ? For this reason: you assume that BEFORE the 'creation' by non-causal means of causality, this very thing was nevertheless already at home and well; for on this basis, you are in fact showing how it was CAUSED. How could it be caused before causality was there by which it could BE caused ? That is the best example of begging the question one has ever seen. To USE as a pre-existing principle, what you are EXPLAINING to SHOW how it came to be, to exist, when it therefore must already have been around before this said use: this is as futile as snow-drops in a bonfire.
No, words can be abused, but the devices of
enlivening discussion by word play are not the same as evidences of unreason.
To show that, guess what ? You have to use the analytical logic to demonstrate
it. You cannot have a half-holiday and imagine that by showing the use of
linguistic utilities, you are showing logical deficiencies. That is not only
begging the question, it is beside the point; it is mental laziness and
irrelevance. To evidence irrationality, one uses, in short, reason, not abuse.
ALL ABOUT NOTHING
We have dwelt on nothing enough. See Models and Marvels, Ch.7 in That Magnificent Rock and elsewhere as in Barbs, Arrows and Balms Item 29 and cf. Item 19, with SMR Ch.3.
Yet let us consider. Here is a scenario. Nothing one day was musing away about things. How nice to have something! it said. So it invented something. And that, that was not nothing! it was QUITE something!
Later on, it felt it would be good to invent something MORE. So it did this. It was simple, a mere nothing. It came all the way along to INSTINCTS, which are at best when not distorted, virtues of reality, things which tend to control and provide, leading and guiding but not entirely coercing, leading in preliminary prepared pathways. These are things so hard to contrive in actual reality, because the interplay between life and program is so subtle. Yet they are here.
Nothing then ? It proceeded on and made gregariousness, and modes, as with ants, where the system is the thing and sacrifice the norm; and bees, where the interplay and communication by signs and actions is so intense and the specialisation so intense. It made moreover consciousness and even mentality, so that things might be recorded and recalled, and pondered a little, as in monkeys.
There is incidentally, a quite notable book by Cherry Keaton, which at first-hand deals with this topic - (My Friend Toto); and it is delightful in this, that it shows the sort of friendliness which CAN develop between mankind and a lower or less accomplished order, such as monkeys. The monkey loved to be with his man-friend, loved to help, to carry things (as dogs can do likewise), and felt a keen affection. It would follow the man, and warn with warning noises when its sensory equipment showed things in the jungle where the man, a jungle photographer, would have been vulnerable. A case of a lion in a bush which the monkey sensed and the man did not, was one where the monkey saved the man's life. It is good to reflect on this potential, as one reads what is to be in places such as Isaiah 65:25.
Such things, phase by creative phase, are easy for a Creator, to create: that is, for THE Creator. It is like writing stories. If you CAN do this sort of thing, so contrive actualities, then it is quite easy to vary them, or put them into a sequential form, as you call for and implement them, and so on. If stories are your gift, then, if that is the level at which your creative power can work, why use it! God has done so in historical apportionments called creation, and will vary and conclude the situation as He pleases, and has no problems with such things.
It is so strange at times to reflect, that
man, to whom so much MORE has been given than is the case with monkeys, can so
monkey about with his thought. It becomes all but impossible for him, in his
pride and irrationality at times, to conceive that ANYONE could POSSIBLY have
FAR more power than he has. It is as if a mist had descended on his brain, as
if the race were growing senile.
Quite the contrary. The trend is towards a
possessiveness, a self-possessiveness so terrible and destructive that man
tends - greatly helped by the atheistic arbiters of irrationality in many
universities - to imagine himself the pinnacle. It is as if a teddy bear,
having duly been made, could despise the man who made him, and feel a sort of
renegade fear plus contempt, since it seems to remove his power and importance:
just to be - well, made! That, for pride or lust, at the
expense of reason, is 'unthinkable'!
In fact, the more man has, the more has he been given, in the rational realities which are capable of being virtuous and not merely virtual, the more in the mass, he grouches and the more he misgoverns them.
In other words,
there is a VIRTUE, a power beyond instinct, a capacity to be and to do what is
sound and strong and enduring, in man, which can be set to good; and this is at
odds with the merely virtual, the imaginative musings which would try to avoid God,
like an unwelcome benefactor and invent what is 'good' as if it were a toy. The
VICE which results is seen in youth from Scotland to Colorado, Rwanda to South
Africa, and now it grows more widespread in the US, in sex, vexation of spirit.
It is seen in older persons likewise, in greed and dishonesty, manipulation of
social security systems and illusory provisions for the weak, which often make
them yet weaker, by pandering to their weaknesses and securing their votes.
SACRIFICING THE SOUL OR THE ILLUSION ? WHICH IS FOR YOU ?
This is all illusion. What is, is. What is given, was given; and the One who gave it, is. It was NOT NOTHING but ONE SUFFICIENT for the work, who did the thinking. Nothing has no power to think in the first place, any more than 'Nature' has power to envisage need and then meet it, as the illusionists who smuggle in God and then reject His name, so often verbally imagine in their vagrant writings. (Cf. Great Burials, SMR Ch.4 Extension, Joyful Jottings 3.)
And what a package He has given to man. Past the INSTINCTIVE, comes the rational, the reflective, the comprehending, the projective, the creation of thought worlds, intellectual objects, putative ponderings and practical testings (cf. SMR pp. 332E-H). Predictions flourish, principles appear, interlocking mental constructions are created and related to the world, and its nature and origin. Often these are misused. Just as a paper aeroplane is less impressive than a Boeing, so its destructive power is less.
Man has more, and his destructions are legion; for the spirit of jealousy, of envy, which led to the death of Christ (Matthew 27:18 cf. The Kingdom of Heaven... Ch.8) is so strong that this devilish lust for a power which is NOT man's, as if it were innate, can flame afar just because the powers which ARE his are so vast and extensive. Indeed, these powers are so singular, that their misuse quickly becomes the very highway to hell (see Barbs, Arrows and Balms Item 29).
There is a gulf between man and animal so vast that the human construction, the equipment granted, is like the control-unit in a glider, turning it into a powered and propelled, usable and valuable search, or scout organ in a war. How small is some of the electronic equipment which arouses new powers for a flying machine, powers that are so categorically greater than is the case with a somewhat similar 'shell' without these much thought-up additions! You could have two aluminium constructions, indeed, one with the intelligence or control unit added, the one that counts, that is personally inter-related with a man, in this case, the controller; and the other without this facility. How vast is the difference between them in operation! How great is the research which has gone into the construction of these additions, however miniaturised they may be for convenience, and because of thought !
So with man before his God. Vast is the gulf between man and beast. The same hand has made all. The same Spirit has made the matter which is the recipient of the powers of mind which are HIS; by HIM is made matter: which has NO power to create itself, and is merely a mute testimony ot the divine articulative power of the One who necessarily therefore Himself is not matter.
Matter is a dependency, with powers implanted beyond its power to make. What is sufficient as a cause IS adequate, and hence that cause is not matter. It is normal to call Him spirit. We have a spirit ourselves by which we can make portentously ludicrous statements because our power to invent thought worlds is so prodigious. We are disobedient to reality in so much; but matter does not have the chance to be so. We are answerable therefore, while it is not.
Let us then return to our illustration, which exhibits the principle, gives wings to it, if you like.
To call a robotic vehicle to scout the battle field, with access by controller and radio relationship and plans and potentials built in, by which it is to return to base if this or that happens and so on: to call such a device, alike, by distinctive definition, 'a purpose-built aeroplane', is madness. To be mesmerised by their common feature at the expense of their differentiation in such a case is as batty as to call both plane and insect, mosquito, definitionally, and not merely in dry humour. Even if both vehicles were metal, it is the same. The similarly of form obliterates the diversity of function from the closed mind; but it is, nevertheless, there, transcendent in significance, in operation and in power. Both fly, to be sure; but one does so much more that any definition which embraces both in its ambit, is not definition by confusion of one quality with the array of words which DEFINES.
If this were war-work, such definitional blindness as this, if employed in the field, would show instantly an unusable officer. He would be daft. He would be so bedazzled by merely superficial resemblances of form, as to ignore the impact of the technical profundity which exists: present in the electronically communicative glider, but as to the other, stark in its absence. In philosophy, however, it is chic. That is the difference.
It is chic, but it is also chicanery.
In terms of function man and animal are worlds apart. That is a fact. The use of vocabulary to disguise its is neither ingenuous nor honest; but a disgrace to the race. It provides however also a base for description.
A race which allows, which suffers such nescience of nomenclature, such abortion of reality in words, is ready for words of judgment. ... a legal and righteous description of their antics and obliteration in their minds of what activates and enables them. Who better than the Maker to judge ? Judgment according to truth, the worst kind to delusives, is however precisely what is prescribed, and what is to be dispensed by the Almighty (cf. Romans 2:1ff.)
How wonderful, what joy that the Judge is also the Creator and that the two are ONE, for God who makes does not approve of desecration of His creation, by the lust of what does not own it; and God who makes has made this also, yes even this. What then has He also made ? That which He has fashioned is the plan of salvation as shown in that Bible which we have demonstrated to be the word of God Almighty, from SMR on.
The meaningful gulf here is between virtue and vice, naturalistic oblivion of causality, making nothing King in defiance even of definition, and so engaging in mere irrationality; and self-discipline in thought. It is between goodness and evil. It lies between knowing your Maker and caricaturing Him; between finding Him and finding therefore what He has to SAY in words TO the mind which He, the first and the last, created in man; and refusing to look. There are the issues, here lies the gulf.
It is between forgiveness and force, between self-possession and willing service to the Creator. It is between salvation and damnation. It is between love of virtue and its loss. It is between heaven and hell.
Who would not mourn for the willing
inhabitants of that truth-denying destiny when the love of God is so manifest
and so attested in Christ Jesus the Lord, that HIS REJECTION seals its
obstructive denial, like a prisoner spitting on the reprieve of the Governor!
Did not Christ so lament, did He not mourn with solemnity and pity, even before
He paid the price for instant liberation for those who come to Him: did He not
mourn concerning even a city (Luke
How much more might one mourn concerning the
eventual terminus of this creation, mankind, some of whom indeed come into
light; yes, lament for the many who proceed by desire into darkness.
Preferred darkness or received light: these are the termini. Yet in the destiny
as children of the light
(I Thessalonians 5:5, Galatians
"SEND
Let darkness flee, the light's for me.
*1
In this regard, see:
The systematic elimination of Kant's rather
obtuse 'antinomies' in Predestination and Freewill, Part IV. Wrong system always falls to
right system, and right system is found only in the Maker of it, who having the
grace to speak, explains these things in the superb and intractable truth which
is His, verifying itself on all sides, like wake from a speed-boat. It MOVES,
and therefore their ripples flow.
See also in the general area, News 82, in Chapter 15 of Benevolent Brightness or
Brothy Bane, and
The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Ch.5.