Mulling over some seriously Big Issues.

The thread that binds all of Christian doctrine together into a unified whole and resolves many of its seeming contradictions is found in a correct interpretation of the opening lines of Genesis, as read in light of the opening lines of the Gospel of John: the Greek for darkness is the same in both, thus making it clear that John is telling how the chaotic darkness that made up the world before God’s light touched it was hell/Satan’s kind.

What does that mean?

It means that the Fall of Satan and his angels happened before the creation of the world, a world which is thus a mixture of Satan’s evil and God’s good. Thus, why there is evil is this world despite God creating it and His being entirely good: He created it by mixing His nature with that of Satan’s state of Hell, and so the world is fallen and has evil despite every part that was touched by God’s nature being good; what God’s nature created was good, but it was perverted and marred by Satan/Hell’s nature.

Man himself is a mixture of God’s nature and the fallen angels’. In this world he has the free will to use what parts of him come from God to find his way back to their original and eternal source—and thus the happiness that comes with it; alternately, he can choose to embrace his evil parts and follow them back to their original source in Hell. This is why he is judged by a Widow’s Mite rather than an absolute standard, the former acting like a handicap in golf to equalize those of unequal talents and inclinations: if we are more weighted toward evil but struggle mightily to use our parts that came from God to overcome them, we will be judged less harshly than men with fundamentally good inclinations who nonetheless made poor use of their God-given talents and barely lived up to their moral potential.

Although there is no perfect justice on earth and evil can and does triumph in the short-run, there is enough of God’s nature in this world to make evil inherently unstable and unsustainable, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. This is how nations are “judged”: when too many of their denizens become spiritually weak, their institutions succumb to parasitism and predators reign within their halls of power, destroying them from within by their nature until such nations succumb to foreign attack or internal collapse. Another way of looking at it is that the closer the population and its institutions come to embodying true Christian ideals, the more a nation begins to approximate (in an extremely imprecise and feeble manner) God’s nature: as God is eternal and omnipotent, so those nations that try their best to live up to His ideals become enduring through time and powerful in a defensive sense. By contrast, those who reject and scorn Him and His laws are almost always short-lived and chaotic—with the USSR and France during the French Revolution coming readily to mind.

Such being the case, Amerika v2.0 is in heap big trouble, in my estimation. Ahh, but is there a silver lining lurking within all this trouble and woe, you ask? This “pain, bruise, and agony,” in the contra-grammatical argot of the American Dream, Dusty Rhodes? Why, yes; yes, there surely is, sayeth I. For starters:

Evil is inherently and eternally parasitic or predatory. By the metaphysical and natural laws which underlie this world, it cannot create, only rob, raze, and vitiate what others have created; and by those same iron laws, the parts of it that are parasitic must by necessity parasitize prey far larger and/or more potent than it itself is, and because of that must of necessity rely on deceit and cunning to survive—wherein lies the great weakness of all parasites, including fully human ones. Predators are similar to the parasites albeit inversely so, typically taking on far weaker creatures than they themselves; lest their victory over a prey be so Pyrrhic that they won’t have the bodily strength to take down later victims, they are easily deterred by opponents of much greater power (whether it arises from individual strength or numbers or both) than themselves. Thus what would spell the end for any and all parasites and predators?—for the former, raise the cost of achieving that deception to as much or more than what can be gained by it and the parasite inevitably dies (literally so for literal parasites; figuratively so for the human equivalents); and for latter, raise the danger of confrontation to the point that even victory will come with a price so great as to make defeat almost inevitable in the long run.

All tyrannous governments are inherently parasitic and predatory, and thus the key to destroying them (at least in terms of their parasitism or predations) or stopping them from turning to such behavior in the first place is to raise the costs of deceiving their host population to the point of being greater than what could be gained by it, and to up the cost of open, tyrannical predation to the point at which it is more (in terms of lives potentially lost and damage likely done) than the cowardly predators are willing to incur. Freedom, prosperity, and (to the extent that the first two may lead to it) happiness are the great rewards to those who are able to achieve those twin feats.

At least somewhat encouraging, if admittedly a long, tough slog getting there. Like I always say, though, even the tiniest sliver of hope is better than no hope at all, no?

Obviously, our Founding Fathers were equal to the challenge of their era, setting a most worthy example for future generations to either benefit from or, at their own enormous cost, to ignore. Question now is, are we—the lesser legatees those titans among men formally, perhaps over-optimistically, referred to as their “posterity,” that is—likewise valiant enough, hardy enough, dedicated enough, indomitable enough to rise to it in our own time? To prevail and thereby to redeem the honor, dignity, and patriotic pride we so foolishly frittered away in trade for a mess of pottage?

We shall find out soon enough, I suppose. As every wise military commander going at least as far back as the man widely revered as “the First Soldier of the Confederacy,” the peerless Albert Sidney Johnston, has well known: one must not take counsel of one’s fears. Despair and hopelessness are the harbingers of defeat, disgrace, and disaster. To blandly accept them as the fitting accoutrements of one’s debased and lowly station—rather than vehemently shunning them as the insignia of the coward, the meek, and the enslaved—can never be other than the most dire of mistakes.

Ultimately, failing to recognize gloom, doom, and despair as the greedy devourers of possibility they in fact are will in the end be tantamount to hoisting the white flag of surrender, stacking arms, and walking glumly off the battlefield before a single shot has been fired, in either direction.