Because its glory has departed from it."

Consider now the elements. The people are sick of royalty, of authority, of righteousness. Having forsaken the Lord, they need to find and wish to embrace some kind of symbols of His rule, that of their imagination, or some synthesis.

Instead, having scampered lustily away from the Lord, filled with fearlessness, recklessness, fecklessness, they face judgment like someone personally inspecting a 16 inch naval gun, by popping his head into the cavity where the shell exits.

"Judgment springs up like hemlock in the furrows of the field." It is like now - people have detested the Lord, been sickened by His love, unruly in the midst of the rules and order which make their own bodies and minds efficient, courtesy of their Creator, using rules to break rules, using order to be disordered, using authority which governs their DNA, to hate and even despise authority: with a will of their own, a life on loan, they go deep into debt to what they want to disown.

In this climate, fear, restlessness, unconscious dreads, unacceptable guilts, cerebral guile, all compete for a hearing; nations disturb and destroy each other, tribes seek to slaughter each other, religious bigots and brigands seek to make religion an excuse for vainglory and murder on vast scales, and you have this world, like a white shirt immersed in blue ink of rather a striking nuance, with additives of black for style. It WILL not wash, it WILL not come clean, and considers at times rather painfully, that as the sky is blue, then being stained that colour cannot be altogether bad; but they do not know WHY it cannot be altogether blue, for the sky is not a man that it should be imitated.

Thus they are stained in naturalism, thinking that of course matter came on a spring vacation when the universe was in a particularly ebullient mood, and even if there could be no Spring before there was something to have it, the last thing the naturalistic philosophers show any evidence of caring about, is reason. So their stains are in blood, guilt and guile, lies, to be perfectly frank, lies about what they plan, propose, wish, and they talk words, words of glory where none is to be met, and ideals where these are but seldom shown by the nations, and sanction wars, or seek to avoid them, by causing crime to be lauded, and invasions to be justified, as in the Palestinian catspaw case for Islamic world rule.

They join together to rule better. Not at all political is it all, they say, but then they point out later, as in Europe, that really you HAVE to have some sort of a concerted political background if your economics is to be fit for the Union, and a currency to fit both, and designs to cover all, with arms and armies of various types, naturally,  to ensure that they stay put, with no invasions, incursions and so forth. Their aim ? to be a 'Christian' Europe ? Well they are not quite so sure about that, and it is mooted and disputed as the Constitution is being drawn up. A thing of  the past ? with Inquisitions, that macabre bestiality which staged a take-over bid, putting political power and armies into the Christian equation, so that it neither would not could balance, not only in view of John 18:36,  but also of that often noted, but rarely considered fact that it is not QUITE the same to crucify and to BE crucified which in Galatians 5:24, Paul tells the Christian, is his or her ... lot.

But as organic evolution becomes a fantasy, a riot of unreality, so that Darwin's tool becomes Darwin's fool, his court jester, and the arrival of the fittest simply REFUSES to happen so that it could survive, and eminent evolutionists talk of the folly of the entire concept, since they conceive the vast array of designs to have come, equipped with sub-branches, relatively at once, and to have died down in the aftermath; while other imaginations compete with talk, but no observations: what then ?

They they MUST have their evolutionary corpse revived, but none can give it life.

What is it like ? Why it is just like those of ancient Israel when THEIR nature God, their idol, their Baal was desired but not effective.

                          Because its glory has departed from it."

That is always a problem with nature-worship whether of the old or the new types. It is all one, that is, they want it one so that they will be the only ones to know the one and possessing it, have one lovely time winning the one. What that one is ? Why neither Buddhism^*1A nor materialism^*1 can tell them, for neither nothing nor some of something accounts for it all, in validity or in the realm of reason, which requires more than atoms for purposive agency, such as man’s, and more than nothing for what brands all that physically lives with its DNA commands, and insists that validity in reason requires available truth, not a model concocted in and for its absence.

The natural  just is - and the fact that no one can find a creaturely ONE, reduce everything to something and have that something a creator in machina, with powers nothing ever is seen to have, or observed to display, the machinery for which is absent, the meaning for which is found in rubbish better than anywhere, a heterogeneous and disqualified morass of what does not fit anywhere so that it is neither one thing nor the other: why this, it is not very encouraging for their one.

They scratch the surface of matter, and find protons and electrons, and they tear great slabs of it apart with their bare hands, if you will, and find quarks; and they consider its poise and its noise and space and the energy devolving within it, and make new theories like new sports car with brilliant originality and teeming changes, mutations indeed wrought by intelligence at work on what is not there, to show that it is what is there, though it never obliges. They insist, life shall be found on Mars (not earth-flying debris but life); and spend a few billions on that. They are sure that transitions before the genera MUST be found, and expend time and prejudice making it happen; but life is no more interested in exposing its ONE than is matter, except for the language with which it is constructed which is busy with commands, just as God was in the beginning, in creation, as you see in Genesis, and see reflected literally in life.

The exponents of vapidity, insipidity, illicit logic and anti-scientific chaos charge into schools, colleges and universities, yes they SHRIEK for their idol, which MUST be there, though if it were, nothing else could not be here; for what is part of the ordered and confined, the contained and the directed is already a product, and its producer is not itself.

But they will have it! Believe! they thunder. Accept this as the best, the relevant, the rigorous, the desired. Religions have no facts! they opine in this slithering State of weariness, and insist that Principals of schools shall pursue and actively implement a policy based on such aberrant political propaganda, factually untrue, and demonstrably absurd; and in view of this, they offer no grounds for the view, as if the absence of absolute truth made it possible for them, on such a model as this, to spit it out and tell everyone.

Hence they do not even need to consider the facts. Religions like Christianity which deal with facts as basic, are ignored, on grounds as invisible as the ONE which WILL not appear in natural products, which being produced, could smirk if they were able, at the sheer shrieking folly of INSISTING that the delimited is the ultimate, as if delimitations were in no need of having been delimited, just obeying laws to this effect, by chance, while NEVER showing any sign of doing their alleged stuff, or having means by which to do it, like shy maidens unwilling to be debutantes.

We MUST have our 'Nature', whatever the nature of nature may be,  and it MUST do its stuff! And when out of breath, now and again, they find that they could smuggle in a goddy sort of thing to have a name plate up in some back-street, while nature does the real stuff; so they claim that it is not really nothing against God or some god to have their naturalism, since it could allow some inactive, disengaged, inactive sort of oddity to be 'there' and have a name, so long as he did not interfere with 'nature' for which they SHRIEK.

Yet, for it has no ears,  it hears them not. Not a blade of grass does it stir in answer to their impetuous cries and impassioned pleas. Never heard of it! says Nature, or would if it could speak. We do not know this making thing! Before my time really! Look elsewhere, for just as you cannot judge a book by its cover, so you cannot produce a product by looking at it! Go where the things are made, and stop being so absorbed: you give me a head-ache just listening to you.

So says 'Nature', the idol, or it would if it could. Instead it NEVER co-operates with this materialistic passions with or without their empty goddy name-plate. Why should it ? Matter is a mere theory of mind the independent validity of which is the FIRST necessity for any theory. Materialism is a contradiction in terms: it waits on what it is not (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

Let us then revisit Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13 for a little review of some of the details of this endless dilemma, or better, obstructionist, self-imposed impasse from impossible presuppositions! ONE ? Yes but of course, for there is  one coherence of design, ONE collation of many interactive designs, in ONE universe, with ONE rational susceptibility to human thought, and ONE mode of life-language, not more than one, to disperse and organise living things, each after its basic kind. It is like a school or a university. But the schools or the universities seem pre-occupied with ultra-auditory activities and bents, and in large measure in such things, to have forgotten to listen.

From Ch. 13, as above then, let us draw to be better surrounded with these things.

2.  COMPILING THE CONSEQUENCES

WE KNOW IN PART (I Corinthians 13:9)

BUT WHAT WE KNOW IS KNOWLEDGE, NOT SLANT OR CANT,
WHEN WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE TRUTH, OF GOD
(Proverbs 8, John 14:6, 8:31-32)

PARTING WITH REALITY IS SUCH SOUR SORROW!

It is surely one of the marvels of the 20th century, that all is known, all is sure, all may be categorised in terms of certain knowledge, Newton is passé, Einstein is in - admittedly he wholly failed after MUCH effort to systematise into one coherent whole, electromagnetic and gravitational matters - but he is IN, and in turn, those who surpass him, not in originality, but in time, are now IN. They are now IN with their non-Einsteinian ideas of non-causative things, things that JUST HAPPEN for no reason, in the boom-bust situation, that applies not only to real-estate, but to academic frenzies.

ALL IS KNOWN (so that the suave brow of 'science' should not be creased, and after all, it WAS the 20th century, that vast repository of 'knowledge' and it IS the 21st, the beckoning unknown); so it MUST be. Yet we are likewise told, NOTHING IS KNOWN: for we are but humble students, the universe is vast, our poor minds limp after vast perplexities. The mood swing is not only dangerous (to both logic and common-sense), but hilarious. Such arrogant humility; such humble arrogance, such ostentatious self-deprecation!

Culturally: Nothing COULD be known in the ultimate, because this is the Kantian orthodoxy, as common as yesterday's pipe. Kantianism however is dead, strewn across the pavement of consistency; and we researched the funeral in Appendix on Kant, in Predestination and Freewill. CAUSATION CANNOT be terminated, since thought is terminated first, and all theories are products of thought (someone's). This was demonstrated in SMR Ch.3, That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5, 7 and elsewhere on this site. Hence the concept that causeless things can be asserted in terms of ANY theory of the mind, is simple self-contradiction.

You can never EXPLAIN or account for anything when the very METHOD of accounting is excommunicated. How could you tell how the notion of causation AROSE, unless you give reason; and if you give reason, they you ARE accounting for it, or in other words, saying WHAT CAUSED IT. Yet if it is only a notion of the mind, HOW COULD IT BE CAUSED, if causation was not yet in existence, in order to operate! Using what you are supposed to be accounting for, employing what is to be MADE in order to make it, is a little too crass even for this generation. If you contradict yourself, it merely removes the need for anyone else to do so, in order to destroy your theory. It is self-defeat.

Hence the concept of causeless events is necessarily false. Logic has its ways, and this is one of them.

All this has been shown.

It is only natural that philosophical physics, the actual realm in view, should be so mutative. It is there that the REAL mutations grow, and these are brought about by intelligence, thought and precise mathematics. These continual mutations are in the thought of man about what he does not at all understand. It is obvious that materialistic considerations, which would by airy reductionism ignore the mind that 'makes' the matter as a concept and construction for thought, is a prime fallacy.  Mind is the mentor of matter and cannot put it above itself, for if mind falls, matter the more.

Such intemperate superficiality is however common: as if the facts were as ready for violation as Hungary by the Russians, Austria by the Germans in their days. It would ignore the character of man in particular, his will and his thought, as CREATIONS of that same will that brought matter to existence and hence to mind; and thought to its research capacity: as if such things were an atrocity like Auschwitz. They belittle what they handle, and handle with belittled hands, what they aspire to: they understand nothing at all in the field, at its basic level. Hence they CANNOT a priori succeed in their desired and aspired-to unification of all things. Things are not unitary.

As to mankind, they are simply a trilogy: mind, matter and spirit as demonstrated in SMR Chs.1-4, That Magnificent Rock  and elsewhere.

When there is realism, however, and the effort is merely to understand matter, the case has some interest, for there is nothing intrinsically absurd or self-contradictory in understanding matter, unless, of course, your presuppositions, once again, are like back-breaking baggage for the task - as in the absurdity of postulating in the midst of a magnificent ignorance, that causation is invalid, and so invalidating ALL your own thought, including that on the theories which come from you while intoxicated with this concept.

The work of John Bell and Dr David Bohm (SMR pp. 414ff.), merely typify the fact that LITTLE is known and MANY hypothesis compete in a turgid mental continuum, which alas, though so in theory, is highly discontinuous in reality. Little beads of theory hang about in just the way some would have little particles of matter, tossed on the 'quantum foam' (Time, Dec. 31, 1999, p. 64). They do not fit neatly. They are all in an uproar. But in THIS mental case, it is the uproar of thoroughly inconsistent thinking which is the problem.

The concept of an interference in the operation of matter, at the most sub-microscopic level, with the interaction of particles relating to underlying conditions which are not conducive to minute level interaction in a direct and simple fashion, is itself close to our own suggestion concerning various barriers and resistances which might preclude simple mobility of acts, as in SMR pp. 413ff.,  419ff..

This world is designed. We have noted that the only way to avoid such a proposition is to re-define design - this admittedly in the biological arena, but no less in the other, for it is, if anything, yet more fixed in structure (SMR pp. 211ff., 112-145, 252Eff., Repent or Perish Ch.7).  It is not possible to avoid causation as noted, and it is not possible to avoid therefore the attribution of sufficiency of cause for the results, and to avoid the attribution of sufficiency of cause (minimal for the results which equal the universe including man), and to avoid God. It is not a logical option. His creation is simply a logical necessity. It is FROM these earlier demonstrated facts that we now proceed.

Why then is there the dilemma of Professor C.L. Poor (SMR pp. 414-415) concerning relativity theory ? We shall now regard this.

It is easy to divide and conquer, and to talk sophisticatedly about relevant partitions and the like; but this is mere technical jargon. The fact remains. If one point leaves another at great speed, the clocks on the leaving one are supposedly going to become retarded. If, however, in a relative conception, one asserts that REALLY, this is the same as conceiving the stationary one as moving away from the  other: it is merely a reciprocal thing...what then ?  In that case, the clocks on the one, first conceived as stationary, but now as moving, are the ones to be retarded. Take the first conceived MOVING away case as A, and the second, thought of as stationary, as B, and A's clocks slow relative to B's. Now re-think it as B doing the moving (as it would in relativity), then B's clocks are retarded relative to A's. The results do not agree: and the DIFFERENCE is purely and simply HOW you conceive of it in terms of WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS. That is the point made by Professor Poor.

In fact, relativity is a feature and a just focus when certain inter-relationships are considered in certain respects; but there is no question of TRUE relativity as the essence of all things, as if relationship were god and results were creations. There is the fixed, there are the facts; and there is the inter-relationship of what are mutually operative phenomena. To think as if ALL were a mere relativity, is to forget the structure for which the attribute of relativity is affirmed. To think as if ALL were unrelated, is to forget the inter-relationship which is built into the structure. IN defining one aspect with some precision, we do not imagine that everything else ceases to exist.

Abstractions help; but they do not rule. Conceiving things in one spectrum or climate or perspective of thought is NOT the same as construing them in some other internally consistent field of intellectual vision. Everything is not reversible, is not co-ordinate; though there are explicit, express matches and co-ordinates at special places in the design, as is common in any design.

While therefore abstractions help, they do not dictate to reality; rather must they match it, as far as may be. You are really seeking to read from performance, someone else's particular cast of thought. It is very limited; but it is not obscure. You cannot do everything, but you may do something if you KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

In the end, it is reality which rules; and it is God who rules reality. At no point is it wise to neglect the nature of the architect when you ponder or pore over house designs, uses and futures. Thus, you see it all and whole and with the right presuppositions (such as are mandatory, when one sees the demonstrability of the Bible rationally), or you do not see it.

You do not see it if 1) your eyes are tightly closed by culture, convention or contrariety of disposition (or any OTHER reason); and 2) if you mind interferes with what you see, automatically redrafted it to meet expectations. Christ covered the case incisively, as seen in Matthew 13:14ff..

• "And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled which says:

Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive:
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.

"Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them."

After that, of course, you must approach the whole topic from another aspect, as is common in any multi-disciplinary approach, where the meeting of ways in the co-ordinating program is a zenith of achievement or desire. In this case, the mind of God expressed in the Bible, INDEPENDENTLY DEMONSTRATED to be His word, and the facts of the construction of the universe illustrate the two, the twin concerns: it is WONDERFUL (complex, intricate, involving 'witty inventions' - Psalm 8, Proverbs 8, Isaiah 9:6); and it is FUNCTIONAL (Isaiah 45:18, Hebrews 1:1-3, 12:25-28, Isaiah 51:16).

Thus the earth in its starry, and God-magnifying setting (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7, pp. 181ff.) performs for purposes of human habitation, discipline and blessing, making apt scope available for the gospel to reach throughout the earth, and for the evil developments of power-wresting godlessness, and religion-wresting paranoia alike, to offer themselves to the earth (cf. Revelation 13:1, on the one hand, and 13:11-12, on the other). It is made to allow for an astral type impact in due course, in the midst of a schedule, not unlike that already executed on Pharaoh in Moses' day (Exodus 3ff., and Revelation 6 through 16). Thus the construction and the emplacement and the durability, and the temporal end to this universe format, all this is in accord with a specialised and pre-announced PROGRAM.

This is currently being fulfilled in enormous detail, and in general principle, both in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and in prophecy. As to prophecy, it is fulfilled MORALLY, MILITARILY, POLITICALLY, ECCLESIASTICALLY, PHYSICALLY, ENVIRONMENTALLY and in general trend (Isaiah 51:6). Of all the intellectual exercises EVER invented, this collation, this co-operation, this multi-disciplinary combination over several millenia outclasses all else in KIND; and as to KIND it does it likewise in INCOMPARABLE KIND!

 

But let us return to our immediate study of the intra-disciplinary phenomenon in matter, of current interest.  
 

SPECIALISATION IS NOT THE FOUNTAIN OF WISDOM

In fact, specialised study does NOT remove the folly of false presuppositions. It is not worthless for that reason; but when you try to make a philosophy out of such studies with such presuppositions, it is PREDICTABLE and EMINENTLY FULFILLED that you WILL and CAN get nowhere. You will engage in such futile follies as assessing it is all meaningless, thereby showing that the category of meaning is well known to you, and that you are very capable in handling it, being (somehow) enabled to declare what does, or perchance does not, have the quality of meaningfulness.

Yet if the inherent quality of things WERE meaninglessness, it would be meaningless for you to utter this 'fact', for the capacity to know what was not there, would be beyond you, and if you could exercise the meaningful faculty, meaning could not simultaneously be absent: so that you could not apply it as a critic, assessor or judge! Permutations of nothing do not create anything.

These things were dealt with in detail in SMR Ch.3, and similar things in That Magnificent Rock 5, 7; but they are ever with us. Inventing in vacuo, the categories of thought which DERIVE from THE REALITY, BOTH physical and logical, of being CREATURES of the CREATOR, with coherence: it is rationally impossible. The omission of this background removes the necessities underlying the assumptions with which we in fact work. It is like being on a limb, and MOST conscientiously sawing it off, while trying to show the crowd below, just how unnecessary that limb really is. You can only fall. A balloon of helium made by philosophy does not hold you when a bird pecks it. It is too unsubstantial.

In short, relativity is not some cure-all, explain all, as even Einstein found (Time, op.cit, p.61). It can make a contribution for certain areas, as did Newton; and it is not that Newton is wrong, but that his results are limited practically to certain situations. Are we then to be surprised if Einstein's thoughts which contributed to the atomic age, are found not to cover all, just as Newton's did not, though they enhanced dramatically the mechanical age which preceded the atomic! Will man never learn to be humble! Not with the humility which despises the reason it uses, while using it; for that is philosophically absurd and self-contradictory: for with what will that which is invalid, establish validity!

The concept that there is an ultimate irrational is absurd likewise. There is nothing irrational about this: that POSSIBLY there is an INABILITY to FIND what happens at certain low levels of magnitude, because the MILIEU in which things interact is not available for inspection at that level (as Ford postulated SMR pp. 405-408, 418-420). Firstly, the upholding of all things by the divine power is necessary if it is to be preserved as logically apt, substantially mobile and energically adequate. It is POSSIBLE to conceive of something self-sufficient, but NOT when it is plainly running down (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) and CANNOT be eternal (for the resources being used up, cannot constitute, though limited, a sufficiency for unlimited time, so that even Paul Davies talks of a beginning).
 

It is possible to think of a different universe indeed; but THIS ONE IS NOT LIKE THAT.

This one routinely obeys the laws of causation (and that includes miracles in this, that the cause then of the multiply attested operations, is found in the super nature and not in the nature which He instituted and constituted as our universe, with ourselves together, one total entity of VERY different kinds of entrants!).

With concepts of turbulence through waves of 'quantum foam', and the resultant difficulty of particulate precision of motion at the tiniest levels, like a boat in a turgid sea (though these be but thoughts among thoughts, as normal in this area of physics), there is now simply one more entrant for the role of logical explanation. It concerns however our LIMITS in BEING ABLE to determine what will happen in certain fields, remote from real life.

Dr David Bohm has  as noted in SMR (note above), considered wave-particulate reality for the wave-particle matrix, with  statistics (and hence the probability concept) as merely the result of OUR ignorance. The MACRO-results of all this, as  Professor John McIntyre pointed out, are clear enough (SMR pp. 409, 412-413). There CAN therefore be no question of deliberating particles! since their deliberations would always be constant and consistent to a programmed end. Nor CAN there be ANY question of the chaotic, for causatively 'correct' consequences cannot come from disorder as a base.

Exasperation and frustration might indeed like to SAY SO! But this is not the fact. What is chaotic is ONLY ONE THING: the presuppositions with which the matter is often approached. From some preferred viewpoint (as with the less than smooth cross-members in the car analogy), there might be something less than would be thought; but from the OPERATIVE DESIGN viewpoint, there is, perhaps, nothing more than is needed. Indeed, in these fields, often what is thought to be nicer, could turn out to be less efficient for the purpose actually in hand. Transfers of elements, components, energy can also have a certain diffuse appearance, whether in water-falls or pulsing of electricity; but this is not poor design, but visible effects of underlying causes efficiently producing their routine effects in the transmissive medium.

It is time the rancid reactions to procedural felicity were replaced by a more objective realisation: namely, that this is something that does marvels and is programmed down to minutiae to the point we do not, because we cannot, find their underlying aspects, remote from view, but not from need. Matter proceeds with purposeful indifference to the philosophers of cant, the proponents of dissatisfaction, like a Rolls Royce of whose tyres, some child says this: LOOK! It has little dents all through the surface of its tyres. It is tiresome, this endless cacaphony of imprecise complaints set in ignorance, contrary to the performance criteria, a sort of carping critical lack of consideration, combined with signally slanted ‘interpretations’ which lack ANY ground but incapacity, and ignore every ground of operational felicity.

As to UPHOLDING, since nothing CAN be WHOLLY self-sufficient, which

a) is created and

b) is running down (and the physical aspect is doing this),

there MUST be such an operation; and of course it is Biblically attested (Hebrews 1:1-3). It explains any problem with the cohesion of matter, and the failure of things to transmute in the arena of their interplay, into something radically different. Such things are coherent. They account for each other. They are logically harmonious, scientifically competent, not writhing with contradictions, or asserting the opposite of the evidence. In this, they are of course in the domain of science properly so-called, such as Lord Kelvin was keen to promote (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming...Ch.4, pp. 63, 73ff.), such as Max Planck insisted on, in all its rationality (SMR pp. 398-400) and such as Einstein was keen to pursue (Time op.cit, pp. 61ff.). Einstein's problem has been considered in SMR (pp. 299ff.).
 
 

THOUGHT THAT IS RATIONALLY WROUGHT;
OR THOUGHT FRAUGHT WITH PERIL ?

Here was a man of true genius, who could see the necessities of thought, in order to be able with validity to embark on it; could not see how they could be gained, but admitted he worked on such a basis. The answer to this problem, as to all the other flecks of thought on the foam of inadequacy (though Einstein's concepts were far nearer theism than those of many) is easy to find, as so often, when adequate understanding PRECEDES the thought. It is to Einstein's great credit that he SAW the need for such an understanding, a basis for validity of thought, but did not at that time see how to get it.

Nevertheless: Better to know you are a beggar, and beg, than think yourself opulent, and boast! Infinitely better, one might almost hazard! He insisted on finding with that same rationality which had enabled so VERY MUCH, already in his theories, even practical things that in some respects have been eminently helpful, and discovering in this way, what remained.

His problem was not (operationally, but it seems it still was spiritually) the wrong presuppositions in this respect: relative to God. It was rather with respect to the universe. WHY should a universe created by God (but here with his philosophy, there was a fudge factor which spoiled the otherwise promising hopefulness of his approach) BE integrable in terms of SOME ONE FEATURE, FACTOR or INGREDIENT! Does it HAVE to be!

The ancient Greek thinkers are so naive that they could almost without help inhabit many an academic philosophy department of today! EVERYTHING HAD TO BE originated by, or coming from, or the product of...

a) water or perhaps
b) air, or perhaps
c) change or perhaps
d) stability, static to the end, and unyielding
e) atoms (although the spaces between them would still be a problem, their origin and their capacities: but never mind, consistency of thought is the LAST THING in these musings!).

So the turgid mess called early Greek Philosophy went on its Athenian way (with apologies to those not of Athens, yet as it were, being Athenian before their time!).

It was, as comedy, entrancing; as unsophisticated verve, delightful; but of course, in practice, absurd.

David Hume's Humorous Humian Nature was another such effort (cf. SMR Ch.3, esp. pp. 257ff.), a naturalism for man by which he could good-naturedly tell the truth to truthless nature! It was quite an epic, the destruction of which is exhibited in the reference given. But the point here is this: there is this thrust of lust, like some burning throat in the desert, to imbibe a unified water, encompassing all things, and the throat as well in its format. The mentor must be it; the will; the lifeless seed of atoms; the particles; the particulate, the invisible, the profound, the cause and the consequence, the limpidity of thought and the crass shrieking of matter, the profound wallowings of befuddled will with the incisive logician's skill! It is what then ? It is the unity of the garbage can, the shredder! But not all is shredded, though it WILL most assuredly be reduced to size !(cf. Ezekiel 28:9), when its implicit pretensions of spirit, exemptions of logic and rescensions of unrealism are as silent as they are now irrational.

Why ON EARTH should everything bother to come from air or fire or atoms or any other element or aspect of the whole diversified and multi-partitioned totality! Why should the errors of thought reside (in man, who is so very good at this particular thing) where the directed atoms know no error; and why should will be found, where things went obviously according to a will which they did not possess, irrelevant to their operations, themselves oblivious of their servitude, not being blessed with so much as the capacity to think! and if they had it, where is the evidence! and since there is none, where is the science that postulates such things to explain what is not explicable, or for explication, since it does not enter into the data of what happens (cf. SMR pp. 80ff., 115ff., 131ff., 284ff., 307ff., 413ff., A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3) ?

Just precisely where! Is this to be the end of the world, for science-philosophy (currently by many vitamised with science almost as if it were a fun fair, for serious-minded scientists, weary of the strait-jacket of disciplined thought and taking time off with a few beers!) ?

There IS A UNITY of course. It is not (and as noted, CANNOT BE) a self-sufficient unity. it is NOT the unity of the wholly disparate; for there is no unity in systematic diversity. It MAY of course be UNIFIED into an operational totality (in fact, this has been done and it deserves research - it is called MANKIND). Here the trilogy of will and mind and spirit is wedded, but not welded. It does not systematically interfere, though there can be some interaction. It is like any other invention really: there are provisions for interaction in certain respects, and there is a construction which erects certain sophisticated realms (like the old-fashioned wireless-tubes), which operate according to their own field, but provide as ingredients, what is needed in some allied field.

The human body is full of such discrete and brilliant provision for mass-production, mathematical unity, and energic adequacies at all levels, from cells to organs. The unity is NOT TO BE FOUND^*1 however by seeing how an electron is REALLY a brain; or a nerve cell really a muscle; or a mind really a slave system, or a will, merely a delusion. How would you know, since you have one; and how can anyone EVER penetrate to the fact of delusion, if it is endemic! If you could TELL, it COULD not be endemic. If it is NOT endemic, then it is merely a possible condition, and then the nature of it, its causes and cure becomes logically possible.

Logic burrows beautifully, and when its end is found, its value is confirmed. It points to God, as we saw in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, with unerring certitude; and when He is found (and the point here is that there is more to it than a discovery per se, since He is a person with His own ways), and in God it finds its source, then in fact His statements are found, and from Him, His word has all things in an order so perfect, that it fills with a just awe, and a due delight.

Thus, THIS UNITY IS NOT from some ingredient. It is in the DESIGN. That is the way with all of our cases, and it is way here. It is in the mind of the designer, the creator, the conceptualisation of the constructor, the mental habitat of the maker, the spirit of the producer, the flair of the fashioner, the thought of the conceiver.

To try to ‘unify’ the penchants, principles, preferences, purposes and productions of what matches the definitive expression of design, with some particle is merely one more expression of the naturalistic fallacy. How does this calumny of logic proceed, and what does it say ? This:

• 'Because it is big, it does not need to be logical; since it is vast, it is rationally vacuous. Large scale enterprises are not subject to logic. Build the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and you do not need to be rational or consider causality.'
  
   
• This vacuity of thought is constructed ex vacuo, despite and indeed by MEANS of its mentality ridden interstices, its formed, finished, coherent expression of just one brand of thought, one language of life, one mode of vitality propulsion. It deploys causality in order to ignore it; it is like using an automobile to deny that they exist. Yet, goes the nursery rhyme, it must nevertheless be construed as NOTHING ELSE COULD EVER BE CONSTRUED.
  
   
• If it were, thought would suicide and its products die with it. This liberty is mere self-contradiction of the grounds of discourse, as often shown on this site (cf. SMR Ch.3, and causation). As soon as thought starts and uses the rationality of language, the results accrue and lead to God as shown in SMR Ch.1 et al.. IF it does NOT start, then there is no language, and a de-created being, not a logician, stares dumbly into space, auto-disenabled from saying one word.

The habiliments, the paraphernalia of its genius are ignored, and the concept that it makes itself is imported, though the means are as absent as the minds that despise the virtue and brilliance of the creation; and the ‘principles’ of such a happening, as ludicrous as any other myth (strictly so-called, since the cause is inelegantly inadequate for the observable result);  while the inexcusability is as vast as in any other case, where profuse examples of what IS the basis, creativity, exist in the VERY MINDS and SPIRITS of those who refuse to believe what logic demands. Here the exact expressions of this sort of thing are in ourselves, constant, if not daily, or with some, virtually hourly events. (Cf. SMR pp. 131, 159, Ch.3; That Magnificent Rock Chs.1, 7,  8; Questions and Answers 3; Ch.1 supra).

There is NOTHING TO IT, when you look at it as an exoteric set of unrelated paraphernalia. Its unity is not then explained, but mocked. This is not scientific theory, but brain-weary dilettantism. The reality which Freud, Darwin and  Marx all missed, like the early Greek thinkers, is in its functional sufficiency for multi-phase operation. It lies in the inter-relation between design and performance - as with a car.

A car has THIS unity: that it goes, performs a transport function, allows passengers to sit, wheels to turn, rigidity sufficient to prevent great discomfort to passengers and too easy injury on unintended impacts with objects foreign to the purpose of the driver. ALL its systems are to this ONE END. THERE is its unity. Its performance is index to its meaning, and its meaning is an attribute of its design, and its creation is the process of thought and intelligently directed energy, by which this purpose is integrated into a design of multiply different TYPES of object, a mere junk heap except for one thing. And that ? ITS PURPOSE. Its design and its purpose mark it out as rational, its purpose marks out the elements of the ensemble as critically able to be appraised.

It goes ? Could we do better, when it comes to life! Have we done better ? Why, we have done nothing at all, studying and considering and coding, and clipping here, shearing there, and acting altogether like Year 8 students in their first year in the lab..

In the case of man, then, we cannot do at all; though some of the blemishes after a few thousands of years on the 'road' of the vehicle called man, can be repaired.

Let us then create spirit ! Let man be very wonderful and congratulate himself fatuously on his imaginary prowess, though he be but made.

Let us articulate the modes of making God-consciousness, personality understanding, ideational originality, planes of thought, originality so intense and profound that errors are not nonsense at times, but the buffetings of the wings in the airs of grandeur, in the thoughts of many things, planes and dimensions, depths and majesties. Will man so speak ? will the denial of logic be assisted now by the addition of megalomania ?

Forgetting his created status, will he now try to imitate God by constructing himself! He cannot even construct its material substructure (cf. SMR pp. 316Dff.). He is like a technician, imaging he is a great tenor when he first begins to understand the deposition of sound code onto magnetic tape, forgetting that originality and its material modes of conveyance from one point to another, are as far apart as heaven and earth;  as are man in the image of God, with divine access, and man in the dumped descration of presumption.

How one is reminded of the word of God, here, where Isaiah prophesied from the Lord, concerning those other idolatries men worshipped, those other works of their hands (for really, it lies in the mind and in the spirit, the things people are illogical enough to worship are mere implements, while we ourselves do better, being implement assessors)

"Indeed they are worthless:
Their works are nothing;
Their moulded images are wind and confusion."

It is now time to continue the approach to this foolish universalisation without understanding, contrary to reality and impossible to thought, cause-free conveniences of nothing, spurting flames of something in odd moments of self-forgetfulness, a mere combination of opposites and non-apposites.

There is a sub-structure of oneness, which never universalises itself, but merely acts^*1. What is ONE is the principle, the school's constitution, purposes and aims. To this end, all the rest is RUN, and moved and motivated as applicable, as far as may be, since humans are not disposable like gases. The ONE is not to be found in mergers of utterly diverse things like wills and minds and servants called matter, but in their inter-relatedness, their underlying systematic capacity to collate or converse as the case may be with one over-arching facility and facilitation. It is not anything that is one, but the ONE who interweaves all that He makes, and differentiates it, individualises it, rationalises it where applicable, spiritualises it where apt, and forwards it, here with force and power, there without it, but with persuasion and discussion and laws that do not require you obey them, only that you find what happens in your own way if you do not care to do so.

It is all equipped, to be sure, with an underlying propositionalisable oneness, but not in itself, rather in its ways and the nature of its equipment. Pepper and salt are NOT one, except as condiments; and the use of the name does NOT make them one, but thinkable in one category. Thought alone can make them one under a name that covers the individualities of both, with no sense of actual merger whatsoever! Indeed, it is because they are NOT one, that it is possible to give ONE ASPECT of them as a mode of reference^*1. This entire and almost infinite systemisation is NOT ONE thing, but ONE METHOD, ONE COHERENCE procedure; and it is vain to ask what possesses but does not deploy such things, to be one. They are NOT one. The thought back of them is one, and that is why they CAN be thought of universally at all.

They are formed as one, and their format is their nature, their conferred nature. Now conferring nature is not the work of a fool, when its brilliance of scope, and form, and matrix, and inter-relatability is more brilliant in material form that ever any man has performed or come close to performing. Far less is it the work of nothing, a mere verbal admission of defeat, the term prohibiting any future for it, whereas it is the 'future' of now which is in view for any such imagined basis or beginning, a simple contradiction in terms. That brilliant scientists should even MAKE such proposals, their words the tomb of the products of their mental womb, is itself a decisive index to that fact that logically, they SHRIEK for their calf, their naturalism; and it will not listen, since it has no ears, or yield its secret, since there is none.

They break it into little pieces, and it smiles, if it could smile; they build it in vast accumulations and conglomerations, and it deems it fatuous, if it could deem; they stir it with X-rays on chromosomes, and it yawns and degenerates, saying, Why on earth are you doing that, you are only messing things up! if it could say.

MYTHS OF HEART

III

In News 100, we  look at many things including the religious variant of this myth, and to this we shortly turn.

Meanwhile ... Myth ?^*2 you ask. Certainly myth: you are trying to get without nameable or adequate causal input, a consequence, hoping by mystery to allay the inadequacy. That is a myth; and the bits that are supposed to do it are fairies or monsters, or wizards or something ... awfully strange! That is how it is. Books write themselves, codes make themselves, even though life shows no trend to new information; yet they do it, in some mysterious ... eerie way. Evidence is irrelevant, like Jews to the Nazis. It must GO to the gas-chambers.

Now all this is very well if it is some children's fantasy, and could be less gruesome and have some useful information in its very own self; but it is not even that. It is myth or Master, pastiche of meaningless or Method, explosion that creates instead of destroying in a fit of fantasy, or creation that provides a unity which is FROM ITSELF, just as my books proceed through myself, and have that sort of unity.

Is book 74 REALLY the same as book 23 ? Not really. But surely, one says, surely and certainly it is IN A WAY, the same ? It uses words, its style is not very dissimilar, its passions and so on, these have enormous characterisability, almost. They must be one. Really ? Let us then examine each word, break it up into its letters, and then look  at the punctuation marks, with Gould, and surely somewhere, somehow, there must be the ultimate particle, be it letter, or part of letter like a quark, or full stop. There MUST.

Why, the books might reply to such scarification (being perhaps a little more articulate than matter, but still only in imagination, like all these naturalistic theories themselves which are thus parodied in such replies),

why do you not see that what BINDS us so that we ARE WHAT WE ARE is not ourselves, and what is similar, is not the PRESENCE of words, but of what they portend, and that these symbols are productions of one which gives their actual usage in our cases just that SENSE of unity which you seek, but will never find for two major reasons. First, our choice is the result of thought, and that is necessary since we are the elements of understanding, producing results in symbolic and hence meaningful ways; for if we were not comprehensible relative to relevant action, we would not be of interest; but we interest you because we ARE!

WE WERE WRITTEN.

Oh no, says the naturalistic purist, present and meaningful, though there be no meaning in anything (admittedly an antilogism, but then we argue with reason in order to remove it, because we have learned to SHRIEK for our calves, our naturalistic idols), present I say and meaningful (given to oratory this naturalism), we admit you to be, but written ? That is heresy. It cannot happen.

Why, bother the man, it is unscientific to have intelligence DO anything.

Why ?  asks the book.

Because matter is all there is, says the investigator in his perfectly unprejudiced state of captivity, speaking his passion, witless of its irony.

Then what are YOU using ? asks the book. Intelligence ? Not much of it that I can see! it says, but in principle, yes. SO you do not believe that you either do or COULD exist ? is that it. To be or not to be has the thumbs down, and you choose not to be: but then, in that case hadn't you better actually DO it, and commit suicide. It is no good not believing you COULD exist if you go on working you know. Contradiction in terms. If you use intelligence to THINK what could and could not be, it is useless to exclude it from your universe.

Even if you all succeeded ultimately in killing everything with intelligence, such as you and dogs and so forth, then there still would indisputably have been the TIME WHEN such things were. Intelligence is as much a part of the universe as matter's product phase; and spirit as much more, with its will able to be rational or rebellious, captious or capable in the provided powers and formats.

There is NOTHING in any of them to create them, as you find by inspection. They are what they are, function for what they are worth, produce in terms provided and often nowhere near understood; but their forms and organisations are replete with all the qualities of one intelligence, making, machinating, contriving, and doing so no more. YOUR intelligence works because its creator works; and trying to ignore the mode of your institution and to make it some kind of a mode of simply operating on a prepared base, is not implicit propriety, but explicit exclusion. Unless invisible reason has integrity, neither does any argument of yours.

Back of the diversity is institution of the same; there is no interface; there is no structure differentiation unit for mind, matter and spirit; nor is there any shrouded machinery for the integration of the operation of these three. Before the institution there is the execution of a command. When it is done, then foreign and alien misshaping of the matrix removed, the creation arises as normal, and acts as directed, except when, able to de-recognise its Creator as part of its liberty, they may so act.

Short of will however, in the anterior domains, they do it, being made that way. Inherent is the command to BE, to act in a GIVEN way, to act in ANOTHER given way, to integrate the diversifications in terms of DESIGN, nothing reducible to anything else of the big three, mind, matter and spirit, but each having impact, the one on the other, each enabling the other to perform its task in the total structure. Then as normal for man, the thing being achieved, the will moves on the surface of the construction, and makes itself felt, for good or for evil. If for evil, then the cost is horrendous, since this is to make war on God.

What practical illustration may one find ? It is like a car, which is not a wonder because of its form, but because of its purpose and its streamlining of components and plan, process and control options for the operator, the person. Indeed,  just as the computer has control over the process, with driver's seat and controls for the driver of the computer and so on, so is man enabled to ACT to institute on the basis of a double derivative (creation of a creation), he being a creature acting on the computer, his creature: except that he may be termed an operator, or less favourable names.

Call him what you will, he operates on the operation complete, his equipment alive, and with the will donated. Deleting the very mode of his action in the imagination of his creation is irrepressible ruin to logic.

Shriek for intelligence but matter will not provide; shriek for analysis, but matter will not think for you. YOU have to use such things. YOU are part of the whole. YOUR will is part. YOUR trilogy is part. Its synthesis is part. YOUR operational ability to see the reason in and the organisation that binds, more and more, and the fact that reason is never stumped, these things show not creation at work, but creation worked.

Operation is never the same as creation. A car, a house, a universe, a law made is not the same as the power to make it deployed in the act of making it. Mere confusion is not an option.

So they move in another way as in the above citation concerning religion.

THE MODERN MINDLESS RELIGION CASE

IV

Well, they say, surely naturalism is ludicrous, but we will at least unify all the religions. Really ? In what way does Buddha without God equate with a religion with a Creator of all, over it all, its Master and Thinker ? In what way does Islam's construction without an eternal Word made flesh, its god without an only begotten Son, equate with what is the opposite ? Can Mr Smith be/not be the father of a son, and yet even cohere in thought ? If so, words have no meaning. If so, then their use in reasoning has no meaning. If so, anyone with such an approach, lacks validity, and we need not concern ourselves further with his thought.

In News 100, we see something of this which may here for convenience be adduced.

ONE is just a unit in the numerical system ... or is it!

It is the lodestar, the magnet, the ultimate for so many people in so many things, the new call of the millenium, as the old call of the ages. Now it has more practical clout.

Physicists try, as we noted in Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium  13, to find a certain ONENESS. ALL the particles have ultimately to come from THIS, or to be understandable as THAT. It is ALL to be particle, or ALL to be wave or ALL to be a determinant or some other obsessive fantasy. IF it DOES not all become one, then it MUST! Why ?

If all the genders, for all the unisex obsession, ARE not one; if male and female are diverse components in the many facets of humankind, of which children are another, embryos yet another, reliability is one, unfaithfulness is another, why on earth should there be this absurd pre-occupation to JUMP the realities, which have nothing to do with philosophy at all, that there are differences of enormous functional importance in male and female, mature and immature, reliable and unreliable? What is the driving force about this compulsion for ONE!

It is interesting that it is closely linked to religion. There MUST be NO difference in creed which relates to employment. The man whose creed is for holy wars, and who may set about them, is to be viewed in some ultimately MYSTICAL way as REALLY just the same in employment prospects as some one who has a criterion of peace. The man who wishes to corrupt children, a paedophile (though here the concept of one is a little less compulsive!) as part of his religion of oneness of all things, is really to be employed just as freely as anyone else. NO! But what if it is his religion that all these things about differences are merely illusion, that what matters is the ONENESS of all human beings, and indeed of all things...

So you DO NOT mean that religion makes no difference! Ah, then why all this talk about it as if it were some sort of naughty thing, to have a religious preference for those whom you employ! If it applies in one field, why not in another ? Some religionists believe in making the world submit to their leader. Hitler had a religion like that, and so did Marx, although only indirectly, yet it hurt the bodies just as much! Does THAT make no difference, that your employe is continually in a state of active desire to forward whatever makes for THIS sort of world ? Did not wars arise, did not spies, did not those in high places in Germany make all the difference for a generation because they yielded to Hitler! Does what you BELIEVE then make no difference to a man, in this obsessive fantasy about oneness!

This thing, this obsession, it is itself, a type of religion, and a mystical type for which facts do not even matter. IT MUST BE SO, whatever the facts, and whatever the cost.

Yes,  they MUST unify and the reason is so simple. ONE political system, ONE logic, ONE mankind, ONE international rule, ONE material basis, ONE religion and so on*3. It is merely the WRONG WAY, GOD BACK result, when you ignore it and go into the opposite lane. It breaks every form of logic, every rule of thought, and unifying the diverse with not so much as an interface, it merely brings in one large pretence. In such a case, ANY matter, ANY religion, ANY man will do, for what actually is, has been denied. It is a form of madness. That men with minds should ever subscribe to it is a patient testimony to the SHRIEKING for their calf, with or without its explicit religious awe: a necessity to avoid God even if logic becomes divorced from them in the process. It is passion without thought, universes coming along without cause, order without basis and intelligence without reason, spirit without construction and all without cohesion.

Then they shriek the more! It has no cohesion! they cry, and weep and wail and invent foolish philosophies in the madness of which they kill each other, saying, WE MAKE OURSELVES! by killing what is not so good. HOW ? you ask, is that to create anything but loose blood, brain cells and the like, till they shrivel in the sun ?

We do not know, but believe! they intone. Why ? How can practical or theoretical refusal to face the necessities of logic create ANYTHING reasonable. It is like starting for your foundation with pure air (well, not so pure, but in the sense of  'air alone'!).

As to this idol of naturalism, its glory has departed from it; and it was mere vainglory from the first.

What then is the response to this litany of the irrational ? What do we say to his, we who believe in God because faith knows no other option, reason no other course, life no other way ? This, then is what we should say.

WE believe because we DO know that the causeless does not, because it cannot come, since denial of course is the loss of thought itself (cf. CAUSES). We believe because reason CANNOT exist otherwise (cf. SMR Ch. 1, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, TMR Chs. 1, 5, Barbs, Arrows and Balms  6  -7).

We believe because what reason demands, evidence confirms, and what both show, is what uniquely validity admits. There is none at all elsewhere, but the TRUTH who is because HE is the Creator, and who shows Himself so that those who otherwise, in a model without Him COULD not know what is not there, do in fact have a truth to discuss. Without this, insanity only would even discuss it, far less proclaim that THIS is it or that. How could this or that bank note be IT, if there were by definition no bank notes!

We believe because REASON, the WORD, the TRUTH has shown in the word of God, the Bible, a unique and otherwise inexplicable testimony to itself, without competitor; and because if it had been otherwise, logic would lapse, truth would retire, man would be insane in principle, manifestly not so in view of his rational works. If the source of this universe were to suffer its lies, fraud, destruction, mutual harassment, caricatures and even denials of Himself, then the principles of KNOWING what He wants and DOING it, would be contravened. NOTHING is what creation can lend Him, NOTHING is what it can produce to satisfy Him, since then He would be a mere component in a system, needing, in a place  set for Him; but the necessity is not thus, but for the author of systems and their interconnectedness, and of course, their existence.

Thus the truth is what He speaks, and being what He is, war against Himself is exhibited as a mere delusive idea of those who wish to extrapolate from creation their own fixedness and wars to make things change. NOTHING controls or contains the One without whom nothing would be all, and by whom existence under control has its origin. War is an inadequacy contrary to Himself, for Himself; and He is not inadequate.

What He will, He has; and what He wills is His; war being merely the intrusion of lesser things into what is here an alien environment, He says and it is both the truth and it is done. If He wants people of liberty to relate or not, then that is there; and if He wishes to ensure that HOW they relate relates wisely to what they are, having wills, then that is done, and it is called predestination (cf. Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 11). Nothing is beyond Him, and truth being His, lying is war on Him, and injustice likewise. In other words, the second commandment, love your neighbour as yourself, is precisely what one would find as verification; and it is there (Mark 5:43).

Justice is mere interaction of His creatures according to what they are and do; and this, it is most distant from what is now the case. Liberty is the power to do this sort of thing (cf. Licence for Liberty, SMR pp.  348ff., Little Things Ch. 5). We have considered such things before (e.g. Sparkling Life... Ch. 4, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9). Thus since the Creator MUST exist and COULD not exist if He suffered such things in any universe of His, then either He MUST have removed us, noticeably not done, or MUST have shown a remedy.

Thus what INDEPENDENTLY attests itself as incapable of other origin than from the all controlling one who knows all future, the Bible, is ALSO attested as the ONLY verified body of knowledge which COULD come from Him, AND that which incorporates a remedy in reality, and not a suffering merely or an ignoring of the problem; and hence it has come from Him. That is why it ALWAYS is right, even though so many scientific theories are shown wrong in  principle or practice as a thing of routine in this most intelligent century!

What ELSE has come from Him, in addition to this unique validity, testable truth where it alone belongs, is testable personality where it alone belongs. IN this Bible is the RECORD of COMING, by prophecy, and HAVING come, by history, of that One of whom reason is never is able to deny one slightest particle of the presentation, either now or at any other time, such as the personal presence time of Jesus Christ (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4).

They match and there is a matchless match of necessity, actuality and verification in the realm of the amazing where perfection is pass, since less than this is incompatible with the truth of God. In science the match of word and action is crucial; and if it cannot be separated, the theory becomes law. Here the result far transcends that, in multi-dimensional realities.

Here then is more.  What logic requires, personality has also come and (of course) personally DONE! This is a new dimension, which moves beyond infantile reductionisms, ignoring facets of their own reality, to cover all the case.

What then ? If it is there, let us see it at work. We have done so, in the word which is written, in the Word which was smitten, as predicted in the word which is written; and we see ourselves, as a race, as if totally and verifiably insane, but actually merely grossly and impenitently fractious and rebellious against God, the truth, engaged in endless war because the truth is treated as not good enough; which makes this race bad enough for judgment.

It has had its time; the Gospel has had its path; the time is coming, and coming near (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), when that judgment will be fulfilled.

Did you think I was like you in your evils ? the Lord asks. Be concerned, for devastation is the special effects result for what denies the truth (cf. Psalm 50); and judgment of personalities is not that of matter or of mind. It has its own special lament, its own special pride, and its own special shame, which is everlasting (Daniel 12). Man is drifting, but as he drifts, he grows desperate, his thoughts and reality so disparate, irreconcilable by a profusion of confusion, based in rebellion, built in irrationality, reckless against realisation. Destruction begins to have an evil dynamic of its own, like garbage uncollected.

It is better not to shriek for idols, as is being done so much in universities and colleges all but innumerable, under the fallen follies of heedless culture, thoughtless, irrational, resolved into rebellion against truth. It is better not to imagine that everything is really one, though each contradicts the other in much, some interdicts the very conception of unity, being wholly disparate, complementary as in all design, but definitionally contradistinct.

	It is better not to dream of unity
	by suppressed and natural,
	but odious and ludicrous misuse of the FACT
	that all is from One God,
	and has the diversity of components that is normal in creations of one being,
	using diversified media.

It is better to call on the name of the Lord. He, being there, can hear; and His name, being His is operational. HOW do you do it ? You ask for what you want, and He having offered, can supply (cf. Isaiah 55). Can you just roll up and ask ? No, you would not roll, as if most mobile, but rather bow and repent and ask, looking up from your tears, and receive freely the pardon, which brings peace, which is inseparable companion of joy, which is close in acquaintance with spiritual power, which relates to being filled with delight in finding, doing and completing the will of God.
 

For arrows, to be SENT to the target is marvellous; for man, it is the same but there is more. It is to be sent by no mere mentor, or arrant master, but by one's Creator to the task which He has redeemed one to perform. That, it is incomparable; and in the question of its completion, His comradeship is all that the One loving enough to redeem, would be expected to provide; and after that, it is more, passing all comprehension, not in some obscurity of wit, but in its sheer profundity and massive magnificence.

Idols ? What have you, has anyone, to do with them! (cf. Hosea 14:9-10).Absurd, they may be shrieked for, but aloof, they are witless enemies of debased mankind.

NOTES

*1A

Cf. SMR pp. 995 -1026. For 'materialism' see *1.

*1

See Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9. This sets out in some detail the discrete nature of 'nature'.

It might well be added to this chapter, but lest it become overburdened, this is left to the reader.

See on 'materialism' or 'monism', also: TMR Ch.  7, Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.  11, TON 19, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 4, Spiritual Refreshings Chs.  13, 10,  Little Things Ch.   5, ; TBW  7,  News  122, Joyful Jottings   3, ASP Chs. 1-3, SMR pp. 422E-L; Divine Agenda Ch.   4;  Lord of Life Ch.    5 .

 *2

A short excerpt from SMR (pp. 378ff.) may help this composite chapter, designed like a bouquet of flowers, to bring more together conveniently as its very tang, while the sense of vanity where deserts do not so bloom, is the other twin in the pair! It is found in what follows, below.

The very modern mythology and the very old Biblical truth

This is not the stuff of myths. The myth is this: that man can tell the truth about himself, measuring himself by himself (as Paul puts it in II Corinthians 10:12); and that he creates his gods, and that is all the gods there are. That myth is surely the best in arbitrary irrationalism that could be. (See the EXTENSION on THE MYTHOPOEIC MATTERS OF MAN, pp. 380-386 infra.)

What is it ? It is this. The creature, with his programmed systems alive and alight, attributes 'sacredness' to his own productions, and ignores the source of his power to construct (or misconstruct), to mini-create and to err, to have a responsibility correlative to this freedom, and to have a body written in language which embodies a brilliance beyond his thoughts... In 'seeing' this blindly, he continues to use a brilliance which, though less, is both akin to it, and gained by the operation of an instrument which he did not create. To do that is to live a myth.

But what a myth it is! All these multiplied billions of deft connections of cells, individually with the significance of highly organised cities, have no source but a 'chance' which has laws it could not cause in the first place, and which, though wholly unintelligent, constructs the most intelligent designs ever inspected on earth, leaving behind the greatest intelligence of man in the process... which does this with a language of the most concentrated and constant character, in what is to man still an unachievably minute form, while building ever anew the same prodigious constructions by a copying mechanism we have no way of paralleling. All this moreover is expressed in all living cells, with the direction of the code of one sole language... each human body living cell having the whole plan inscribed, as if for good measure, or an architect's signature. Exhausted, the myth looks away, drooling that all the laws underlying all of this have no cause. No law has any cause; they just stick around.

If this is not a myth, I would not know one. It has all the objective criteria of myth, such as self-contradiction, illusion, irrationality, desire and defective ramblings without rigour. Building on all that is now known, it despises what is known, ignoring every basic logical premiss.

The myth maker par excellence, perhaps surpassing all the former races and times in the scope of his unsophisticated verbal grandeurs, is this twentieth century man. This maestro, with his increasing technology is so advanced that he here denies everything he has ever seen, flouts the way all things are observable to proceed; and based on nothing, in torpid oblivion of reason, he proceeds to devise and cause to arise for himself, something from which everything has come, itself squarely - if self-effacingly, based on nothing. Here is inadequacy idolatrised.

The irrational virulence and absurd popularity of this myth together attest that style of degeneration, departure from the faith, that turning to fables, noted earlier as a verification of specific scriptural predictions (such as II Timothy 3, and 4 and II Thessalonians 2, Matthew 24). It is worth stressing that the other criteria Biblically predicted for the end of this Age are likewise simultaneously coming to pass; and that these things await us in Chapters 8 and 9 infra, where they are seen to be elaborately satisfied. Turned aside to fables is the verdict of the Bible on this time, and this in full knowledge, as Daniel 12 predicted, that knowledge would increase: something predicted for the same period. The great breadth and extreme shallows that would occur together are indeed noted; and are indeed visible at this day... Myths?

What world-sitting-on-a-turtle is worse than this very modern myth! What it lacks in subtlety, it gains in assurance.

Myths, yes, but nothing can compare with the myths of atheism and the mimicries of agnosticism (*4), whereas truth, this is as we have shown, the prerogative of God, and His power to communicate is seen not least in His power to make communication units so vastly programmed, and yet so subtly free, as we are. Myths? Yes these there are, like the myth that this God has seen the ruthless folly of lies, deceit, injustice, murders, genocide, myth-making caricatures of His name and even at times in His name, and has done nothing about it, has not communicated so much as a "Whoa!".

There now, that is a myth to make the child's spine creep. Myths ? Yes such myths as this: That God did not make it clear what He wanted, and what it was He said, or that He did not send what it took to get what He wanted. Myths ? Yes, such as this: That Jesus Christ was not deity and yet was incapable of being successfully criticised and effectively confronted by brilliant and trained men with maximal motives, securely entrenched and surrounded by force, even when He claimed to be God Almighty; or that the people of that time were oafs barely able to think, and so failed to handle it, whereas as Hammurabi and Ebla and the ancient writings showed, in fact, man had a brilliance and the subtlety then, and long before. In what fields ? It is seen in law, imagination and commerce; while involved mathematics is displayed.

In communication and expression, man had capacities long before God sent Christ, which in subtlety and strength challenge the intellect of modern man. We have been at school longer, ever amassing; but the minds are the same. (I could wish for a congregation which would follow sermons of the complexity and challenge of those of Chrysostom, in the early part of the first millenium after Christ.)

What a lordly myth-making society modern man has become. Or if you want myths, take this of His disciples: that they forsook all because they believed nothing, and that they lost their lives to defend a pretence in order to reach hell for deceit, after suffering or torture on earth; or that they practised folly with an outlaw, when the necessary evidence required by the Bible for His authentication as the claimed Messiah, was clearly lacking, and all this despite their overpowering evidences of spiritual passion and the stakes for fraud.

Or again of His disciples, this: that His stalwart followers did not bother about the scriptural identikit, by which the Messiah was to be known, the predictions and requirements showing that He must perform miraculous healings... and just to finish it off, demanding that He must physically rise* from the dead, and His flesh not see corruption, or rot - Psalms 16, 22, and Isaiah 35 - after being fatally pierced; and accomplish that small thing, in 3 days. This He also personally declared repeatedly, like a supernatural Houdini, dealing not with difficulties, but with death. (* Points 13-15, p. 760; pp. 781, 788; 931-943; Ch. 6 infra.)

How arrogant can modern man become in his arrant myth-making! That, physical resurrection is really hard to do, especially after crucifixion. Try it some time if you have the mind; and are willing to be experimental; but make your will. As I believe British Prime Minister, Gladstone put it: If you want to found a new religion, just get yourself crucified and rise (according to prediction) in 3 days. It would help if the prediction had been out, specifying the rest of your identikit, for a few thousand years and, as we shall see in Chapter 9, the period of history in which this was to be done was also very precisely predicted, from hundreds of years before.

Myths? Yes these, society's current cultural gods in their framework, these are myths: but Christ is irrevocably rationally attested. He showed Himself the living laboratory, deity Himself who sacrificed His body, but not His truth; One not merely unmoulded by the conditions of culture, but directing the very history of culture, according to scriptures He endorsed, or words He provided, meeting all criteria of evidence, reason and morals, and handling contemporary and coming history as though it were His obedient child.

 

*3

See News 121, 122, 82. In the last, there is a convenient synthesis, cited here for wider coverage.

Thing and thingummy indeed, is this 'Nature':

without knowledge, but rather inscribed with law;
without personality, but rather inspired from the Lord;
without gift, but rather the recipient;
without progress, but rather the Second Law of Thermodynamics;
without gear for architectural planning, but rather showing itself as
the spectacle of the same, from the hand of the Lord;
without progressive variation, but always the same in kind,
since the creation it continues, while much of mankind
kneeling to the naïveté of naturalism, to gods that do not save,
looks for inane gobbles of grace,
then all but perennially, in great numbers,  spits it out!

Nature! It is however not merely a recipient of gifts; it is also an engine of rebuke (cf. Genesis 3). The curse is not for nothing. The mosquito, for example, that delightfully apt little war weapon, has one of the most persistently mobile, heightened agilities you could wish. It seems to see, to sense, to swerve and to accomplish evasion tactics of the very first order, to buzz to let you know, and to avoid to let you know something more, that it is small but significant, like so much of sin. Its medical equipment includes a whole series of instruments of which the brilliant surgeon might be proud, its heat sensors help, its piercing assists, its injection mobilises the 'eats' and it is a nuisance; and again, like so much sin.

It is a parody of pomp, an imitator of avarice, an expression of our littleness through the success of its own, on target, able to spread disease if we do not stamp it out, it is a part of our 'problem' while, ignoring God, we seek not His aid, but more to bomb, more to oppress. Are not the data on Afghanistan women almost beyond belief, in that Moslem setting of repression ? Is this not increasingly typical of an unfeeling buzz that penetrates the human family with a fever worse than the worst of the mosquito!

 End of quotation.

Let us pursue the specifically religious side of this domain of culture and its productions.

Since that was written, Afghanistan has been ... liberated ? Or do we even here the all but inconceivable noises of making a State where Islam is fundamental ?

HOW could that be democratic, or free, or avoid the persecution of minorities in the name of blasphemy as the goad to murder, and the icon replacing truth!

It is possible ? Here is force in faith, that ludicrous contradiction in terms (cf. SMR pp. 50ff., 65ff.), so that you may suffer murder, mutilation or imprisonment if you do not 'believe', or act as if you did not 'believe' what after all, does not measure up to the criteria of evidence or logic, either in life or in its holy book (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff.).

SO then is it possible that there is a square root of minus one ? Possible it is in the realms of thought, not in the logic of truth.

Yet, after all, it might be urged, Brezhnev had a stable of USA cars, as it is reported, and he did not believe in the elevation of class ? That however is the case of power making exemptions and exceptions for itself, not liberty in a system which, being logically defunct, is vitally deficient (cf. News 37, News 122, SMR pp. 127ff., 925ff., Divine Agenda Ch. 6, Ch. 3, Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4, *2, Beauty Ch. 4, *2, Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch. 2, News 82, 97, 98  -Spiritual Refreshings ... Chs. 3 and 4 and 13 - Repent or Perish Ch. 7). They did not bring liberty till they lost power!

Such systems, vocal and voluble in words of power and deeds of oppression, rely on violence, its threats and its intimidatory devices. They lack reality, and so live by its suppression.

Even if, however, in such a case as that of Islamic states,  humanity ruled in the place of vile violence and suppression, it would merely be an advance, in that freedom allows better information so that at least some might escape the perdition of delusion - one in biblical terms preferring darkness to the light which speaks, a light which needs no violence to be established and sustained: the light of Christ. Being strong without mere force, He HIMSELF, allowed and even ensured that there was no use of force to protect Him, and forbad its use in such a field (John 18:36). Islam as often shown (see above references), has used, does use and continues to use force in varied alignments of power, violence, law and rule, social contrivance and mob assaults, even where faith is the issue, and so qualifies as irrational in all such works.

To change that is like changing the equator to the poles. It could happen ? Oh yes, provided you reconstructed the earth, or here, the culture in which it is formed and by which it has been fostered among millions over thousands of years.

At that, if democracy were to be given to Afghanistan, rather than a pre-emptive Islamic strike which repeatedly by its own recognition, wants to suppress all other possibilities, then that would be an enormous gain, an act of kindness, rather than putting paid to a war which right or wrong in conception, then leaves millions to the mauling of mere brute force. IF it were guaranteed that force would not be so used, that minorities would CONTINUE to be given option to campaign and gain government if people changed their minds, why then what is this but democracy, and this without being the criterion of good government, at least allows it!

When judgment comes from the Almighty, and the time is near, then His power will indeed overthrow folly; but not mere power, rather judicial assessment, based on truth, ineluctable, remorseless, inexorable, unanswerable, divine and conducted by Deity Himself. Those who then reject the light will live without it, a condign and innately profound result.

Meanwhile, among mankind, the shift to drift back to the devices of violence is equally a drift on to the issues of judgment.