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CHAPTER 7

 

TELLING TELEOLOGY WHERE IT GETS OFF

AND DAD WHERE HE IS GOING

 

 

Margaret, Harry's intrepid sister,  was not uncanny. A Nurse, who had now become a medical doctor,  and older sister of Harry, she was much in his counsel. It was she who saw at once the danger of the dynamic dementia in her father. She liked to think of it like that. Hu had always been drastic in his inward desires, smooth in his outward show and devastating in his grasp for power. It was time, she determined, to speak to her father.

 

Knowing he was at home, she sallied to the fray, protective instinct for her little brother, now a grown man, foremost in her thoughts. She would attack the matter in her own way.

 

Calling what had been until recently her home, she made a dinner date with her parents and arrived punctually at 6 p.m.. This would allow time for talk.

 

Her father, used to her thrusting personality, but admiring her attainments in medicine, in which she had recently qualified, had mixed feelings about her advent. Smiling quietly to himself, he felt it should at least be a stimulating if not vivacious interplay when she arrived. Her Monaro arrived in the driveway under the oaks, and her splash for the flash was soon locked up, its alarm ready for action if need be. She had a particular dislike of being deprived of her car by the mere passing lust of some thief, or for that matter, the thoughts of some gang of sophisticated car thieves. Besides, not yet married, she had an almost maternal feeling for her car, which she had in fact picked up relatively cheaply second hand, with a handsome mileage of just 10,000 showing by the speedometer.

 

Embracing her father in that slightly distant way which kept emotional expression within bounds in the family, the more readily so in view of their notable differences, she cast her lithe body into the waiting arm chair with relief. It had been a busy day, with her intern period past, and her new interest in psychiatry beginning to bloom.

 

Her mother, Cleo, to whose name she smilingly always tended to add to make Cleopatra, was her usual charming self, luminous, lambent and alert. She needed to be that, with such a husband; but it seemed he could be surprisingly affectionate when he felt the coast was clear of philosophical pirates, political competitors and intrusive aspirants.

 

Dad, she exclaimed, how are things between you and Harry!

 

How unlike her mother, thought Hu, this dashing salience, never letting things develop with that smooth politesse and crafted consideration which he had learned to display, if not to feel.

 

The young man is quite the seminarian now! he replied, feeling that to typify things would allow more general conversation with less danger of exposure of his actual thinking.

 

Any seminal thoughts to challenge you ? she asked.

 

He thinks too much about God, and too little about man, replied Hu.

 

In that case, is he challenging you ? she retorted, determined to prod Hu into some kind of admission of what he was doing about Harry.

 

I am not God, if that is what you are implying of my belief pattern! he parried, and what is more, I have no belief in such a being.

 

You certainly have belief in another being, called Hu! said his daughter with that charming moue which he had never learned to appreciate.

 

God! he said: the fact is that there is a teleological pattern, a force, a power, which draws things on to itself, like a beckoning spectre.

 

Why not say Fred Hoyle and be done with it ? are you a disciple of that former intellectual giant ? she asked.

 

Not entirely, but that aspect is sound, I believe, responded her father, repressing an eminent desire to draw out his redolent pipe and to start ruminative inhalations.

 

How, Dad, on earth, then, would a pattern draw anyone to anything ? and what power is in a pattern ? That is a geometrical arrangement of parts in space, whether these be articulated or integrated or merely the passage of line over space!

 

Well, I also said a power.

 

A power imparts acceleration to mass, dad, and that is not something to account for, or secure destiny for thought or meaning or man. It just moves the furniture about if you will.

 

Her father felt that near approach of exasperation which Margaret since a little girl, had always tended to induce, perhaps more than any other person, and smiled to cover this vulnerability.

 

Look dad, why talk all this philosophical muddle, since you do not appear to like the light on it ? The fact is that if you want something prospectively to impart design, and to accelerate thought, and facilitate intelligence, and make of man something that progresses, and such matériel of thought as he so often triumphantly produces to match the material world, then the whole productive entity has to have not force, which is mere motion propulsion, if you mean it as the term is in its naked state, but the ingredients which USE it to produce the desired or imagined ends: in this case world of developments, with a developed flagship called man.

 

Force is one aspect, intelligence for the construction of the same, is another, understanding of the current parameters of spirit, mind and body is another, far past the most advanced medical knowledge, and infinitely beyond the limping luxuries of human thought called psychiatry, which moves more and more to pills for progress. What progress! giving them little things which merely muddle the mixed up situation we have any way in millions, rather than concentrating on cure.

 

WE do not even understand the essence of personality, via medicine, only via the Bible, which gives the meaning to will, thought, perception, the concept of person, spirit and drive, right and wrong. Jung saw something of the need, but stopped short of receiving its requirement, always looking for authority: using religion, but avoiding it.

 

He saw meaning but avoided its source; he realised design specifications, but ran from their origin and authenticity, merely seeking to contrive this and that somehow or other for practical purposes, while moving out fast in the slipstream of action, from what it implied. He thought of life, but was destitute concerning its nature. He tried to integrate the personality, but omitted the soul.  He looked for symbols of life's expression, but did not grasp at all what life is. He was like a doctor operating on the body in terms of symbols, but not actually seeing it!

 

You see that by the way he looked for religious keys to enable the congealing of the components in man; but his use of authority, especially from religion,  merely aided cohesion if it happened to be the right one. As to that, he was as ignorant as a child, and more so, obfuscated with his own illusions of unity without design, authority without truth and announcements from a theoretical model which simply did not possess it anyway. It would probably 'work' if you cut off a sore finger, but understanding is required of what it really is if you want to be adroit, helpful and wise.

 

Illusion is not integration but disintegration. He missed the mark as much as Columbia did in the end - the mark of this earth where it was supposed to land.

 

That, in the so-called prophet of the 20th century, is mindless confusion. He tried; but was fuddled by systematic omissions of God. Others omit differently, but commit the same error. Finding truth in its modelled absence is as wise as finding milk from a street lamp.

 

Your perception, Margaret, is always astounding, replied her father wryly, hoping to provoke some sense of outrage which he could turn to advantage.

 

What is the good of imagining something for which the evidence is zero, and all tests are negative! pursued Margaret. If this Force, this Maestro of yours, this Spectre beckoning on the universe to greater things, yes, and with Hoyle, this Intelligence, for the professor at least thought that much through, physically and relevantly: if this Imparter is to be beckoning forward effectively, what is then needed ?

 

It is the vast knowledge, which turns 'beckoning' to action to effect progress; and that makes it a spiritual Intelligence, divorced from matter of course, since that is merely an elementary stage for the directors of matter, a programmatic procedure plus form, way below the necessary powers to perceive and manipulate it. It also needs will and purpose, in order to engage in 'beckoning' which implies the ability of the former and the intention of the latter.

 

All right, so you believe in a Spirit more advanced than ours, an intelligence way beyond ours, one which is moving things forward from in front, rather than pushing them into place in the first case, from behind, a teleological power ?

 

Yes, you could put it like that if you wanted to, I suppose, sighed Hu, who had already had several political meetings that day, draining his self-control markedly.

 

So, in the beginning, before the progress started, before the decline which requires a beginning began, and before any series of declines which require a beginning, began, there is this Spectre, beckoning. What on earth, however, or beyond it,  is the good of beckoning what is not there ? What is beckoning if not an imparting, a creating performance (creation is the term!) wrought on what is there ? 

 

Why believe in a metaphor, implying personality ? Why not ignore argument by analogy and conceive what you are implying in principial language ? You want the power and purpose, the intelligence and the imagination, the thrust and the capacity implied ? Why not say so, and give the things their name, and if you see them as ONE, then give it the name. The usual name is God, and the logical method is to have something made in order to be beckoned, before you beckon, or purposively implement works of total comprehension in refashioning it with all the understanding that first made it, in order to turn it into something else. If this is your thought, let us not wave wands, but talk of what is in mind clearly, logically and causatively.

 

Does it have to beckon things first of all, for them to BE there ? That is just a metaphor for creation, then. Whether you realise it or not, in effect, you believe in a Person with power to create, who created, though you seem to like to ignore that aspect, and then you hold to the idea that for some reason which all science fails to find attested in any action of any kind at any time, this Being is supposed to have brought things up to plan, more and more in a very gradual sort of way. In fact, the reverse is the most explosively impactive evidence, the loss of biota being enormous, and NO new design advance having ever been witnessed.

 

Let us then adjust the concept to the facts: we have an Intelligent Spirit with imagination, purpose and thrust, who first conceives and creates, and then gives to what He makes, to each, its appointed KIND (that is, in view of Genesis, for example, BASIC KIND, not highly differentiated species as some recklessly imagine).

 

Well, said Hu with that adroit defensive parrying for which he was famed if not famous, there is evidence that things advanced.

 

There is none that they advanced gradualistically, as Stephen Jay Gould attested in his Wonderful Life, and Denton in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; and the Cambrian deposits in Canada to which Gould refers, so well show this. If designs are far less now, than in some earlier stage, as Gould's view of the empirical fossil evidence indicates, how is this some kind of attestation of an increase in them ?

 

Are we to speak in opposites, and is 'science' now to be the child of arrant and erratic philosophy to this point, that a beckoning spirit is supposedly making things advance, when a departing design structure is making them decrease. The former is a theory; the latter is observation carried out scientifically. There is nothing else for 'science' divorced from fornication with philosophy to do, but to acknowledge this and return its bulk of arrant deviators from scientific method, to creation from behind, and to leave the contrary imposition of the unempirical concept of coming-to-be kinds, where it belongs, in the soup of superstition. If you prefer 'philosophic muddle alien the method of science and the requirements', I have no objection to that.

 

Do facts have no more place ? Margaret demanded. Is imagination, that wonder power imparted to thought by the creator of ideas, to become the author of fact, and is fact to become a moron, then ? If you run erratic imaginations into fact, there is a collision helpful to none; not to mention running these into the Spirit who made it all, at the same time. 

 

Is regress progress ? Is hope science ? Is counter-evidential clutter and chaotic thought, using words to the contrary of reality as found empirically, to become some kind of enfant terrible of thought, to be thrust into the situation in case anyone thought clearly instead ? Are we to have a New Age of unreason, and drag the Goddess of Unreason through the streets, in pitiful parallel and contrariety to the other effort of the French Revolution, when theirs was the goddess ... of reason!

 

You weary me, my dear, sighed Hu, with one of his best impersonations of a caring parent.

 

All I know is this, that man is the highest, that knowledge is increasing, that we are becoming more aware and alert to our own powers, that the material universe is developing not in itself, but in its accessibility to man, that this power is to enable us to do things with our imagination, and that soon we shall be riding the structure of things beneath us, to achieve things currently above our powers; and while I am at it, let me add this one thing, before you interrupt.

 

I feel a certain destiny in myself. Something or someone has to have it, if anything is to happen; and I believe that as Secretary of the World Unity Force, there is in myself a certain stirring of understanding and knowledge of a strictly personal kind, spiritual if you like, since admittedly it is not material. No, it is not material in any sense of shape or colour, weight or exhibition to be measured or seen, which suggests to me that the world through our organisation might achieve what useless wars in the past have all failed to attain.

 

Margaret felt amused in spite of her heightening concern for her father.

 

If no major movement in kind is anywhere attested, she responded, then what is all this about the best coming later! Haven’t you read of the footprints in very early times, man’s steps mingling with those of dinosaurs, attested with refined academic zeal; and of the finds which prima facie put man at some of the earliest phases ? You see that in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 204ff., 252C, and the whole muddle of contradicting parties in evolutionary ideas is exposed in places such as pp. 226ff..

 

You know, dad,  that disc of this and many such books which I gave you for Christmas ? And ancient dating is in danger of collapse and debacle as the velocity of light itself is now subject to such question, over thousands of years, that the efforts to date distant ages are little more than a flirtation with fancy:

You remember, I pointed that out to you when I sent you, years ago,  That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7, Section E. This too is on the disk. Have you read it ? If not, why not ? Where is your zeal for truth; and for that matter, your answer. The point there made is this: that the only certain thing about the date of the institution of the universe, or if you prefer, the time in our years to which our kind of time can go back, before with the universe it was instituted, is an unknown one. The only agreement which can be wrought from ALL the separate indicators, as you see in that volume, is one several thousand years ago. Recent advance and predictions verified from Dr Russell Humphreys have helped to tie it all up nicely.

 

Then when you actually go back to the beginning – and of necessity there was one – for energy is not unlimited in this created universe, and imaginations of renewal are not scientifically the same as evidence for them or their imaginary source, which provides their existence in order that they might be, and so be renewed in the first place: where do you end but at the beginning! From this must come energically the whole supply to sustain them, or the entire system projected for them: then this magical making of things from what lacks the power, over a long time to cover the problem,  becomes more a mockery than ever.

 

To lie in a chair for a long time does not write an essay. Watching the essay paper deteriorate tells you nothing about its being manufactured, or for that matter written on. In other words, we see decline and reason for it; we do not find creation and evidence of it: we are logically forced to look outside the system for its institution, and in looking, we need what is adequate for all its components, both separately and in designated unison, to make such integrations and unitary purpose-beings as mankind. You find all this treated in the disk I mentioned, not only in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, but in Sparkling Spirituality ... Ch. 8, which mentions Davies' development,  and in News 57, 59, which covers some developments concerning Denton, and matters of simple logic!

 

This all deals with the whole misnomer of 'principles' as source, since this merely describes assigned modes and actions, not HOW and WHY they were assigned. To be assigned, you need to be the subject of consigning powers, and they to have what it takes to do it. It is like saying, Lipstick is red, so that is how it was made. A principle is a mode of operation; our interest is in its institution and ground, the power behind it and the capacity to MAKE, not the capacity to be describable! Far less is any just concern given to anti-empirical flusterings and bustlings with words about beckoning futures, ignoring the past, and its institution, and the present, and its unmoved testimony as well; let alone the degradation of actuality in terms of design, which is not a good observation for accounting for increment, is it!

 

In fact, in general, the METHOD of beginning is so far removed from the METHOD of continuation in any institution of something, be it car or universe, poem or hair-do, that to argue from the one to the other is little more than mysticism. What is needed, is to keep to the facts that are visible, and not to let imagination run your life. Evidence points away from nature, logic enforces it, verification exacts it, and it points no less securely to God of creation, and to the Bible which alone stands as the outward, testable script to match our inward DNA: it points too to worship being placed where it is due.

 

On just one point, I'll take your time here, Margaret pursued, inwardly and secretly amazed at her father's unusual restraint. Looking him in the flickering eye, she continued.

 

Evidence is accumulating like a speed boat approaching the shore, on the young age of this earth, and the confusion of flood deposits requiring rapid deposition with gradual work of large numbers of years which simply do not FIT the cases examined, is merely bizarre rotation of thought in the air - as if masses of fossils in vast tracts and numbers were something gradual, or tree trunks for millions of years waited patiently without rotting, while rock formed about them, were anything other than intellectual impudence!

 

Such theories are little more than a trance, an evasion, and stand on the very brink of delusion. Dad, I HAVE to watch these driftings, for if we continue to have delusion as a social custom much longer, the price could be higher than Hitler ever would have exacted. HE was man; this, it is dealing in the face of God.

 

In any case, deterioration which is what is observed with the design schedule, is not improvement, reduction is not increase, and impoverishment is not enrichment. Why not have at least some relationship with the facts, occasionally in the field of creation!

 

One fact, my dear, sighed her father, is that if you continue in this vein much longer, I shall address your mouth to the door, and beg the latter to give it room for egress. My feeling is based on my experience of men, and women nowadays, and I believe I can control all that is needed, to get people where they need to go in order to find a satisfactory world. It is, to use your language, an assurance in my spirit.

 

Margaret regarded  her subjectivistic parent, so keen on objective-sounding speech, with a detached air, partly sorrow at the conflicting impulses, unresolved, partly interest as a physician, and partly disquietude as she estimated how these surges of inward splendour might affect her brother, if he interfered by what he did or said, with the paternal glow.

 

She decided to proceed further than ever, for Harry's sake.

 

Feeling ? she questioned. In yourself ? in your spirit ? So a Spirit is calling your spirit to achieve things, beckoning you forward, though what CAN be measured is going backwards! Remarkable indeed for a proponent of naturalism; or is it a mystic naturalist that you are, dad ? Is this self-contradictory concoction of thought causing you to become inwardly what you are not by observation ? It is, I fear, just as in the case of many others in history, who have thought exaltedly of themselves or their plans or their programs, whether the craze was for the mere splendour of superficial power, or  for the superman with Nietzsche who as its author,  frankly went mad, but provided stimulus for the last valiant try in Nazism, as well  as collateral for Communism, in its own fairy magics.

 

You, dad,  feel that despite the rank stability of the mind of man for thousands of years, and the exquisite powers of reason shown in Plato and Aristotle millenia ago, for all their errors, the intense imagination and innovation in thought, that nevertheless YOU are becoming a different sort of being thanks to a spirit which obeys your thought, or even stirs it, only to accompany it: one which however is impaled in the universe which disobeys its progressive allure. YOU, you are to befriend it, and be its darling ?

 

Here is the wonderful MOMENT in time, that never knew such things since the creation ? Is that the splendid case, dad ? Facts provide regress in the equipment given to life; hope is for the opposite. How scientific can you get! Meanwhile, the only ground for rational hope is ignored, caricatured or turned to plastic in the inventive mind, and made subservient to its product!  On YOU it must depend! It beckons into being; but it is you who go. In fact, however, you have already been instituted, and the beckoning is not into being, into advance, since this is mere imagination; it is into delusion, like Lady Macbeth at work on her husband.

 

Well, if some spirit is moving me, what of that ? I know in any case where I am going, and I plan to get there, and to be what I want to be, over as many as I choose to be, to bring them where they need to be. I trust my dear, that this at least is clear.

 

There is something in that, perhaps, his daughter mused aloud, watching the tension lifting her father's eyebrows in that uncanny way he sometimes used, as if they were themselves trying to invade his hair, and to overcome the interval between this and his forehead.

 

Why do you imagine such a movement in your spirit is progressive, however, she asked  ? Change ? Certainly, mental patients attest that. Now do not misunderstand me, dad, I am not suggesting at this stage that this is the problem; merely reminding you of empirical facts. Are you showing more love of truth, showing more exhibits of well-attested verifications of statements and principles which you hold, as time moves on ?

 

On the contrary, your feeling is not even testable. It is coming from a spirit of some kind, this is the clear implication we have found. What however is the purpose of that spirit, that so anomalous spirit of which you speak? Why imagine that this so expressive oddity is benevolent! It is in vain to imagine it will do what is never seen in history, just for you, and make a progressive upthrust on your being, as a world first! The only upthrust in design is long past, and the new design phenomena in KIND, they are these: loss! Your boss is loss.

 

So I am in league with the devil, my precious prodigy ?

 

Your endeavour to distance that Spirit who made man in the beginning - a fact from which on analysis you cannot depart, by talking about the future and making it definitionally vague by a metaphorical device" this is scarcely a credit to your care of thought.

 

Ever the dutiful daughter! sighed Hu.

 

However Margaret was stirred because of her suspicions, gained from Harry, that her father might indeed be harrying him, if not worse, because of dread of the divine, that Spirit, the Lord whom Harry served, and might be applying his subtly destructive modes to competitive agents, even if one of these was ... his own and only son! She resumed her thrust therefore.

 

If then this Spirit made all in the first, how is it beckoning, seeking to induce co-operation then ?
things to reach up to it in the last are made able to respond, then ? are pre-programmed into sequential mode ? You have beings made so that in due time they can unfold a potential to appreciate what they could not, and what is to be appreciated sticks around in order to be appreciated, and then the inard power of design clicks on like a light switch, and untold new reservoirs of higher being unfold like blankets taken out of the closet, for Winter!

 

Have you realised what prodigious power this implies, and how much more difficult it would be than simply making what was desired, and instituting it direct ? which of course is the ONLY thing the evidence attests of kinds of design.

 

Altering houses is a vast undertaking when they are ornate and extensive, and doing it to the billions of human components, fitting it all for something else would be a nightmare on wheels!

 

It is not surprising that we NEVER find evidence of new advance in design information in descendants, in kind. IT DOES NOT OCCUR. Facts do not interest you ?

 

A dark glowering rather like the aura about a Mt St Helen's contemplating eruption with some furore gathered about the jowls of her father.

 

Indeed, Margaret had only rarely pursued her father to such an extent as this, but his apparent megalomania set her to the task of dutiful daughter indeed; for if callow imaginations about the past, in confrontation with evidence, were to become the fuel for flaming dreams about his own future, and that of the world, and lead to the usual arrogant efforts to make everyone SEE and DO what was in mind, in HID mind,  little could be lost by efforts to awaken him to his peril.

 

The case was infinitely infamous already! He had used so many wiles, so much guile, so much confusion by pouring into the conditioned minds of his acolytes, themselves victims of decades of incremental propaganda, that it was like seeing a new Hitler, imperial style. It was perhaps now or never ... so why not now ? Thus she proceeded while her father glared with that angry flame in the eye which many had learned to mollify with kindly words.

 

Moreover, she confronted him, did it, this beckoning force plus intelligence plus executive ability plus inordinate wisdom, did it implant the power to remake yourself within you ? YOU would need to have the responsive intelligence  to comprehend what you are not yet, or else it would be exquisitely programmed, so that the assembly line could make itself and its product, both! Minus evidence, minus reason, minus efficiency, and minus YOU!

 

Where are these programs ? Where is their storage ? what is the name of the storage units ? of its programmatic whole ? what is the test triumphantly concluded to exhibit this matrix in man ? or where is your intelligence to respond and make yourself beyond yourself, a contradiction in terms, if you want to be in it ? Perhaps YOU would do some of this ?

 

And where is your evidence on ANY one point of it all, this vast, variable, magnificent nexus of innovation crystalised into existence and hidden beyond all sight or inference ? where precisely!

 

Absence is not my idea of presence, or non-function of function, any more than your intelligence to marshal things for what you lack and wish to enable yourself to find,  my idea of sufficiency! When you are to transcend what you ARE, then your need is not yourself to do it.

 

What then DO you have ? and what IS seen at work ? and what DOES manifest itself in history, in this being called man, in the creation which he is ? In fact, into the human is implanted the power to be born, and to die. Dying and losing organic stability and controllable dynamics is not my idea of advance or progress. It is what I find scientifically, however. You no more control what you are in KIND than does a wave control the ocean, an aircraft the air, a computer its program.

 

Let us not be so physical! shouted Hu, by now stirred beyond bearing. It is a spiritual dynamic, if you like, which is stirring us up to realise the human potential within ourselves.

 

Dear, said Cleo, I sometimes think of my namesake, Cleopatra. An ingenious, inventive woman with perhaps some of the powers of a military commander, a Greek in Egypt following the break-up of the Empire derived from Alexander the Great. She pushed programs and purposes to the limit, even marrying Caesar and being installed in Rome, until embarrassed by having the 'most powerful man in the world' summarily executed in effect, or if you like, assassinated, she left.  

 

Later, back in her Egypt, involved with the next hopeful world ruler, Mark Anthony, she inexplicably sailed off, reportedly with 60 ships, to watch all that she had contrived to make, control and expand, implode in confusion.

 

A little thought about history shows me not some great invention of the human spirit continuing to become greater and greater, but insidious and often hideous defenestrations of beauty, reason and reality from the minds of the 'great', till they fall by their own gravity and disgrace. It is when they fly so high that it is vacuous pretence struggling with vaunting, vaulting pride that they crash. Planes do much the same. This is the spiritual version of it!

 

Thank you, Cleo, jeered Hu, with that special malevolence he reserved for 'loyal supporters' who were difficult. Cleo looked at him with that judicious mixture of pity and purposefulness which so often characterised their relationship. This as usual rather subdued the power eroticism of her husband for a moment, while Margaret continued the attack on his delusive spirit.

 

All right, then dad, pursued his daughter. Then your spirit is able to find what is beyond itself by itself; or to find the implanted functional power to activate its invisible and unevidenced programs, and you can raise yourself beyond yourself by yourself. Pretty wonderful causative program! If this is not sheer irrationality, where the vacuities of all you say, are the only consistent aspect, what is or could be!

 

If the Maker changes your spirit to a new kind, perhaps we could see it happen ? Or see the certifiable results of such increments of power and design ? or see it done in the past ? We are, you remember, now talking at your request, of SPIRIT!

 

Or do we find some reference from Him to substantiate the claim ? Your scenario seems to be this, overall. He speaks to you (or the thing, the quiddity, which was not there, quite a feat), speaks to what was not made, and it co-operates to understand the realms beyond it, to which it is not cognate by nature, so that a miraculous power is given to conceive the inconceivable and so become it ?

 

Miraculous, or with what ? With what is not yet there ? So it is a miraculous provision of a spirit which has all the powers to be the entire Creator of all things, which has to you revealed what neither history nor evidence, nor times past nor times present, nor evidence OF ANY KIND, in any way attests ? It is then a deceiving spirit, for it is pushing an intrusion into your thought, but giving only contradiction to what is past, and self-contradiction for what is to come.

 

Later it comes to others, like you ? and you labour with the movement ? Is each of them a miracle man too ? You know Dad, when I see a miracle, I believe it; but a verbal miracle, for a 'christ' who says to this man, Arise! and take up your bed and walk, and NOTHING happens precisely, this is not even intelligible, for it mocks intelligence to consider it.

 

Or you simply passively receive like a school reader being published  ? but you are not paper, but person. This is some adventure, for the new KIND, a stark and miraculous creative act. You want us to to 'believe' ? Christ gave REASON for faith, never being able to be caught, despite His claims to be God, and never failing in prophetic fulfilment, in time or place, or in confrontation with any, and always doing JUST what He said, till death was the only determinant for man who wanted NO GOD! But you ? NOTHING of this kind is found anywhere, and yet we are to understand this amazing, invisible, non-attested miracle is vigorously at work! Where is it, this product then ?

 

To be quite kind, dad, what kind of a new kind is it which does not vary from the old, in desire for power, power of thought, focus of concentration, dynamic of designed parts, integrality of the whole! It is like the Emperor's new clothes! only the cognoscenti, the glitterati and the literati see it. He is really naked, but they pretend, pretend, for the sake of their survival at the court of the deluded peacock that he was.

 

The evidence then ?

 

Is it to be found in intelligence ?  not noticeably. In spiritual understanding ?  Not perceptibly. What in fact are you trying to explain ? What mystery are you seeking to create ? It is like asking how a new car arrives on your lawn, when there is neither car nor lawn: an exercise in futility, a duping of fantasy, a motion of imagination without the restrictive force of reality, in thought or fact. Non-events are being explained by imaginary actualities. How does that differ from magic ? illusory magic at that! THIS magician provides us with 'magic' which does not even happen!

 

What is not found is explained by what is dreamed up, and it is all undetectable, both the cause and the result. It is the work of an illusionist in politics, instead of on the stage. Indeed, on the stage only booing would follow an imposture; for WHERE is this magic!

 

Is this the marvel we await ? This is where teleology ends when you look at it with rational mind.

 

Your spirit starts it all, moves it all at each point ? you are God from the start ? I am sure your mother did not think so.

 

Or being started, this 'new creature' can become what it is not, by a power which is intelligent and prevenient, creating each step for the next ? What a pity it NEVER leaves the evidence of these design changes when they are sought for over the millenia! You deprecate the physical, you do not provide the spiritual. It is an exercise in illusionism, founded on air, cradled with care, born of imagination, ambition its father and psychological method its mother.

 

You want to be physical ? What if Gould stated he could not even imagine such steps in his Wonderful Life! steps leading from one basic type to another! And he was impassioned on the evolutionary model.

 

You want to be spiritual ?

 

If that 'power'  by which you mean person of thought, initiative and control, is itself developing, what created its medium, its growing power, what potentiated its potential! It is merely a slipshod god, a conundrum of idle mind, explaining nothing, shown in nothing, meeting nothing, an evasion. The requirement is non-nothing: for nothing has no future. Otherwise it is something-with-a-future, an adequate non-nothing, aptly called something. As foolish as nothing as basis is, yet it is scarcely better to envisage some vital innovator 'inside' fixed and certain beings, whose powers and potentials are nevertheless inscribed in DNA physically, and its associated structures,  equipped with the powers required for the invention of will, spirit, mind, analysis in an analytically inclined being, capable of acting aptly in a formed functional set of law-girt media, and the integration of the same, with life governed in its physical side by one language, one set of symbols, with billions of orders contained in code, resulting in observably stable or declining results!

That is some assumption, the very God of creation invisible, inside parts He has made, working their change contrary to the observable structures, and using infinitudes of capacity whilst His presence lacks all semblance of evidence, and the 'results' of such immanent changes lack the privilege of seeing the light. Creation is merely being aborted: turned into myths and smuggled back into a basis where it has no home, housing or place, attestation or result.

 

You invent a developing thing which is becoming what it was not, while its evidences of creation stay put! You are implicating an inherent God, whose works of your kind are as invisible as the logic behind them.

 

By such an illusory god, then, the work of imagination in defiance of reality, both empirical and logical, the past production fulfilled,  there is an imaginary coming into line, in the present, for its patient products. But what are they ? They are miscible with mist, denizens of deletion, friends of fiasco, and quite simply, mute as to fact: unseen, unheard, unnoticed, dreamed into an illusory existence, they compete like naughty children, seeking attention, but having nothing to offer.

 

Its power vacuum corresponds to its logical vacuum, and this to its evidential nullity:  its very existence its very existence a combination of negativity and nullity.

 

If only your words were null and your speech zero, sighed Hu! His thoughts however were far more intrigued with the needs of the hour for his power, and the steps which might be ... practically necessary in view of this apparent son and daughter alliance, yes, both in spirit and in co-operation.

 

Margaret used his temporary abeyance, to pursue her presentation, savouring the chance to take time before the musing of Hu departed, and he arrived, the practical man of affairs, en scčne once more.

 

In fact, she was declaring, thriving in the still air and the temporary quietus of Hu, the evidence is for this: a static human spirit with soaring dreams and diving ruins, repeated over millenia, never learning, never advancing, except where there is one stability, one evidentially attestable book, the Bible, one historically assessable prince, Jesus Christ, whose word does not change. His way continues in irony to judge its dismissal by the way all other plans fail, all other elevations decline like gliders in a downdraught, and man at war and at odds advances to the abyss, now looming so much that final fears are beginning to make mankind yield almost ANYTHING, so long as they can grasp this globe a little longer.

 

That is the practical observation amidst the radioactivity, the green grief, the DNA loss, the biota in decline, the ozone layer diminishing, cancer increasing, power erupting and personality corrupting. The last two constitute a separate blast for destruction, added to all the others, like an annihilative couplet.

 

The irony is intense: as man admires himself by advancing in knowledge of the intricate realities of laws in nature to which it is bound, and which man therefore can utilise, so he deplores himself by using the power to harass and even annihilate his very existence, in psychotic personalities having an all-time boom, in fears and harassments, in pollutions and corruptions, in wars of thought and spirit, some wrought with guns, with bleeding bodies and broken minds. Far from this is anything good, or which will bring peace or prosperity. The theory that distemper is the real health has had its day. It is merely the prelude to death.

 

Advance that endures and is stable, it is made ON the truth, like a rock is advance indeed; and this is a matter of pollution-removal by washing, stability acquisition by being founded on truth and power-access by restoration to the Designer's company, the Creator's comradeship and His supervisory instillation of righteousness, equity, understanding and truth. You build where there are foundations, and that, it stays.

 

Build on the sand of castles by the tide, and woe betide the castles.

 

But Dad, there is something else, and it is the reality that needs observation.

 

As to Jesus Christ, His new man, His regenerated man, then, this is simply the original restored by the power of the Creator, as Colossians 3:10 depicts. It is not some waffled up, winched aloft imagination of superman with all its rancid unrealism.

 

On the contrary, this 'new man' is to what was created and required at the first and active till the las. It is seen not in new kinds of construction, as though God were forgetful and decided to pull out a few more stops, like some mere creature growing on a given basis, derived from the actual God. Far from it. In the 'new man' of Christ, we come to the restoration of the beginning (Colossians 3:10), a revitalised because recovered personality, to unmuddled minds, cleansed spirits as in Titus 3:3 -7, to restored vision of what was there from the first, and will be to the last. We arrive at some novelty, but at renewed perspective based on reality, at adoption to the family of God who for the new man, now is not merely surmised but known.

 

We come to the One who has the power needed at the first, being once more based on the intelligence, on the Spirit of the Creator whose survey of all creation includes the invention of the limitations of time, the building of the scaffolding for man, who of course in turn built the structure to rid himself of his Maker, on the Cross. Now they - in fact, you Dad,  use the Earth Unity Force and other unified religion means as convenient; but it is too late, my beloved parent, too late! God came and was crucified according to plan in human format in one epochal evidence of love, realism in displaying what sin is and what its destiny is, and one display of creative power in resurrecting the body, a testimony for all time.

 

He is, however, not available to be ravaged now, though His grief at folly is not changed. Alas dad, it is man who is to be ravaged first by himself, then by the results, then by the judgment. God has done it; and man is doing it: God the salvation, and man the desecration. It is like rubbing a healed wound with sandpaper. The substance simply goes, burnt out. It is like Isaiah 57:15: God does not strive forever, since man, limited, would wear out.

 

Why die, dad, why die! for God has no pleasure in this self-inflicted wound to the heart of man, this eccentric decrepitude of spirit, imagining in its fever it is great, just when it is the most failing! If it were not so tragic, it would be disruptively comical.

 

That I should have begotten such a tragedian! mused Hu, half-aloud.

 

Margaret could scarcely believe his quiescence, and was remidned of the time when David visited his persecutor, King Saul, and took his spear in an ironic declaration of loyalty. The Lord, she recalled, had sent a deep sleep on the camp ... So with Hu ? Only the glint in his eyes suggested the volcanic inward movements of his spirit, not yet articulated.

 

Rumblings or not, Margaret decided, here is a fair wind: let's go. So she continued, Cleo too staggered both at her daughter's sacrificial intensity, for she understood the protective work being done for Harry instinctively; but Hu was reflecting deeply. It was not so much on what Margaret said, but on the needs this showed for action, in a little while.

 

Unhindered, Margaret therefore continued her Phillipic.

 

As to meaning, dad, she pursued, this is a basic point. The meaningfulness of man at the last, that he should be tolerable, with point and purpose comes from his grounds of institution, not his destitution in unreason, dreaming films of thought, as evanescent as the morning mist, and less clean. Meaning CAN only come from reality, and reality beyond and for, imparted to and active for man can only come from the One whose mind made man's design, contrived his parts, created his spirit and gave him the globe for history.

 

You have actually to ask, not the buyer, man, but the Maker, the manufacturer, God, what man is for: and HE is most clear. He is for truth from God, peace with God, joy from God, love of one another, worship in the beauty of holiness, understanding of heart and self-control, for instruction like a child, for growth like an athlete, but always on the foundation of fact, of Creator, now Redeemer also, in Jesus Christ. It is propositional, it is personal, it is promise-verified and personality-buttress.

 

THIS is what is to be seen, to be attested in changed lives, not super-men. Supermen become mere paraphernalia of passion, like macho men, advertising their meretricious splendour, and laughable in their puny lordliness. Dad, are YOU advertising what is not there, and spending your life in trying to become an example of what is already excluded ? I grieve for you.

 

But what are you advancing ? It is a culture, a spirit, a disaster contrivance. For man is still thinking of advancing in some inscrutable way, contrary to all evidence, ignoring the initial creation of the Spirit who made him, as if he could seize its powers and deploy himself without ground of any kind, like a Pinnochio for all the world. Imagining himself wise, he becomes the very paragon of conceit, the Prince of deceit, the caricature of his own manhood. Paul says it in Romans 1, man says it in history, continually more clearly.

 

In what way does man come to resemble a Pinnochio? in this: it is not that he thinks that as a wooden thing, he will become human; but that as a human thing, thinks that he will become God! Become what has to be eternal in order that he should be at all ? What madness of fallen mind is this fiasco of futile philosophy! It is a very contradiction in terms from the outset. It is flamboyant vocabulary, flaming out its own inordinate passion.

 

Pinnochio ? Thanks Margaret, my dear, you quite excel yourself.

 

Verbally dad, you are missing my point. This is super-Pinnochio. This is a created spirit wanting to control and manipulate the powers of the Creator of spirits, the Spirit of God, to turn into his own Creator, a mischievously delusive and obviously inane supposition, contradicting the very realities in view. You can no more do this than could I as a child manipulate you and control your powers. Although in your image, I did not have the intelligence necessary to understand, far less manipulate your paternal person! A creation of God is infinitely less able. It is necessary to receive what is being broadcast, has been broadcast and will be, till the Age ends.

 

At times, I wonder about that! sighed a weary Hu.

 

Was it possible that even he was beginning to listen, almost to hear ?

 

The case with God is infinitely worse, Margaret continued, since He utterly comprehends you, thought and all, motive and every phase, every phrase, just as He knows each subjective parry and thrust, used instead of trust.

 

Dad, you are being rather sweet to put up with my forays, I know, but it is this or real mental danger, believe me. In this, I AM speaking clinically and historically; and thus doubly empirically. This is what happens. New Jesus Christs, Napoleons and so forth, they are merely delusive substitutes for performance. Many have trends in this way; there is a spirit of this devilishly delusive type; but some individuals, desiring to lead, or led by the nose. There's another Pinnochio aspect for you!

 

Let's not pre-judge, exclaimed her father. Let's see what this one does, shall we ?

 

You have already judged Jesus Christ, the Bible and the facts to make one new stew. The only judgment is this, whether you will resign this misleading spirit, dismiss its deadly pretences, as bad for you as for Eve at the first, and recognise His majesty: or not.

 

You are treading the anti-empirical path of imagining that there is a current construction of some super-man, super-power, super-achievement of some spirit, which is certainly not God, but which would need His power,  by whatever verbal manoeuvres you seek to avoid the phrase.

 

With their own verbal manoeuvres, men have imagined this, in one form or another, for centuries. No cranial development is perceptible, no personality advance is notable, though vast decline is assessable in prodigious violence, with millions murdered whether by Rome, the methods of Mecca, the wonders of Moscow, or right back in the day of Jesus Christ, by the contribution of Jerusalem itself,  in the interests of such motives as power lust, national survival, envy.

 

The passion of impurity and invention even for himself, is man's in many manners: he wants to make a new universe, a new man, a new hope, a new future, a new reality; and he is a mere product, endowed with personality, equipped with spirit and presuming in arrogance, as if imagination made, or being product enabled production of what he himself is. Imitating God, he fails because he is not God. It is so simple that a child could understand, while men of passion, emphatically not child-like, want to be their own Father!

 

How then does fallen and rebellious man proceed ? It is  by untruthfulness, manipulation, guile, murder, inveterate hatreds, endless disputes, vile dismissals of human beings because of ideological and ambitious lusts and so forth. It is by breach of faith, even one body NAMING Christ, murdering and robbing and pillaging Christians, in order to let their own imagination make a man "God Almighty on earth" and a piece of bread, the body of Him who said, "The words that I speak are spirit and they are life".

 

It is ever new, ever old, ever decrepit in deception, never at peace with God; and the only good thing about it that it becomes an enormous contrast for the new man, which is that same man restored to his first created state, who so often dies at the hands of the dreamers, and is massacred by the forces of this world, which wants itself for itself, and as for God, to their mind, He can either go somewhere else, or give His own name to these maddened passions. Some choose the one option, others the other; both blaspheme as only false impersonators may.

 

It came like a boil to its inflamed head, in the last century. It is so very much the way the French have it in this, the more it changes, the more it is the same. Lust or bust becomes a must!

 

Cleo regarded Margaret with that peculiar affection which can flourish when one sees another do exactly what she had desired long to do, and yet had not done so fully. Inwardly, she thanked God for the courage of her daughter, and silently prayed for her. Margaret herself was scarcely aware any more of the various changes in her father's countenance, and pursued her quarry like a ferret in a rabbit hole.

 

However, she declared, objectively, it is growing worse as restraints diminish, personal philosophies are more and more built on personal self-fulfilment,  and the inevitable clashes come where power groups like yours come to imagine that international expertise or opportunity is divine power, while you or they make

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disreputable illusionist spectres the guide, or

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feelings of advance their mainspring, or

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anti-evidential postulations their dynamic

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and built on vapour, erect towers of thought that have fallen before they reach the second floor.

 

It is then that if not they, others begin to discover there is no foundation. When you are building, to discover this is unsettling; and at the political level, it means more noise, more propaganda, especially in education; and this is precisely what is happening.

 

Knowing all things and so knowing better than to indulge human promiscuous passion, in order to adjust the prodigious powers of man, God in His Spirit is not co-operating, as the finale waits for its crescendo.

 

He is not making caricatures of divinity through proposing inane half-formed spiritual things, partial creations, fossickers and fops, like daubs, certain to err because of incompletion, twisted and writhing because of inadequacy, dad. HE is not doing this. He is not making half-built fanatics, murdering because, through unavailable defaults, systems not yet in order, they simply crash. It is man's inane theories which are doing this; and his boisterously bucolic educational themes in naturalism, humanism and other idolatries which are doing this, and the spirit of deceit, the devil indeed, which is giving thrust.

 

That sort of scenario merely produces a contrary-to-fact and illogical rationale, as if the Spirit who made, made a mess because He either could not or would not do better at the start. If that were so, then God as part of a growing being, would be a mere creation, and it shows so clearly that what you are dealing in, dabbling is no more God than is the devil.

 

Well, there IS a mess, certainly, said Hu.

 

Let us be logical, retorted his daughter. If he COULD not do better, then how has this Person managed to become better now. If the Being has to grow in order to be able, this is merely an anthropomorphism, as if this Being were in some system, obviously built on the analogy of man, so that it had to grow up.

 

In that case, the real Beginning is the One who made and potentiated that system in which such a being would exist, and we are, in speaking of such a seamy spirit of deception, or imperfection, not talking of the reality at all. It is mere antinomy through lack of thought. The basis is based! That, it is antilogism itself!

 

How hard it is for many to realise that the basis is what the word declares, and logical necessity requires, every wriggle merely exposing assumptions to the contrary, and so avoiding the logical thrust. The something could do anything because there were no limits, and he HAD to be there for ANYTHING to come here, and WE are here. Could! yes.

 

But if on the other hand, He WOULD not do better in the beginning and so deliberately chose to made a mess like man, as you envisage him, then this means that the Being WANTED mess. What sort of a mess ? it would be one in which his will made lies and fraud and deceit, evil and error out of mere desire. This would make of the Being just such a person: it would be someone contrary to itself, expressing in contradiction what he is. If however, he were composed of or in contradiction, then the warring parts being antithetical, he is a contained and controlled being, not able to be one, but labouring in the pangs of clash. Clash cannot be required unless one is unable to prevent it; and one cannot be unable if there are no limits.

 

Then we are looking at an impetus and an imposition, and for such a being, his system is contrived, so created, so that it is a creature of which we speak, and so not God; for  He is one without outside invention and so without internalised need or compliance with what is contrary to Himself. He has NOTHING dowered by His construction, since He was not constructed.

 

But suppose someone said, Yet he might WANT to have an internal clash. He might want to say one thing and do another, to be one thing and yet another.

 

Yet if you imagine such a being as you have in mind,  in fact itself a lover of lies and fraud and deception, the devil indeed being the nomenclature, and imagine this to be God: then you have what MAKES TRUTH WHAT IT IS BY CREATION, at the same time DENYING IT BY DESECRATION, as in the work of an imaginary half-formed man. In such a case, there is nothing to fulfil but desire for the Being's own caricature by the incompetence of the incompetent creation. Making such half-way human houses, means constructing something fraught with results!

 

Truth is hurt; and since truth is the reality of creation, the Being would be in opposition to himself, slayer of his own works. He would mock himself, since alone he did it. This betokens dissatisfaction, for of what is satire the butt, but that of which one must disapprove! If the Being were thus, then instead of being satisfied in the first place, having no limits, what he wanted to be, he would have failed, and so have been a mere creature; which of course is precisely what the god of delusion, called by Jesus Christ, the god of this world, is!

 

You would be looking at a kind of school-bully, dissatisfied with himself and seeking to vent his spleen and inferiority on others, to make them his own exhibits, either for glory, to enhance his prestige within or without, or for gloom, to despatch theirs, to make a better comparison. This is pathology, and pathology betokens being in a system which is beyond you, not being beyond all systematic constraints, and existing precisely as is desired. In this way, man's anthropomorphism brings worship of the devil.

 

Further, if you imagine the Being wanted to be self-contradictory, with His power He would DO it, and so cease to be. To contradict yourself with infinite power removes you.

 

The "I" in that case would be self-destructive, and would not exist; and this is the mode of existence of a self-contradicting God, of one who says one thing and does another. It is ZERO. It is true that a pretender is just like that; but he, so far from being God, is the contradiction; it is external, not internal, it is infernal. Caught up in time, and involved essentially in it, such a being is limited, and being so, would consist as a creature.

 

Once again, Dad, this means that in this sort of grubby degenerate,  you are envisaging not God, but a feeble creator of your own mental vagaries. This is mere temptation, and ought to be resisted as illogical, surreal and the very thief of God's name.

 

What then is this devil whose dealings deal ruin to man ? It is a being with  an internal war, which means a constitution at war with itself, which means lack of power and abundance of compromise with oneself, which implies a creation by someone else. It is infinitely far from God, which is why such an error makes people miss the point, and drags them into irresponsible alogisms. This is precisely where the devil fits in: an inchoate, passionate, non-increate prodigy of desire, always trying to mimic, mock or surpass the God who gave him being. He is seeking to inspire man with the same passion, and then to take him over.

 

As to God however: The same from the first, He did the best from the first, and man has done his worst, and so become worse. That is the danger of liberty, a pre-requisite of love. Yet it is not thrust onto man; it is desired by him. But what of God ?

 

God is harmonious with Himself, since there is no 'self' to control or limit Him: I AM is who He is, I AM WHAT I AM. He CANNOT be contrary to Himself, to His self, since there is nothing of that kind, no contribution from birth, since there is no birth of the eternal in Himself, no demarcation by Creator: since it is of the Creator that we speak. There is NOTHING TO BE CONTRARY in God, none to impede His will, countermand it, dislike it or disturb it. What He does, is. What He says, is. He is not made of competing, contrary parts, for these need to be differentiated and deposited, dynamised and constructed into a system. The maker of the system could be God; but the system CANNOT be!

 

So what God says, and does, these agree. Nothing does or can interfere, except for a created being, a self conferred on an instituted being, who not being God, is irrelevant.

 

Hu stretched himself and yawned.

 

I am glad, said that supple mouth, that your God is not needy. One of his children may become so if she continues her ratchet twisting much longer, my ever so dear daughter. In Hu, pride and peril linked in this case, to an unusual degree; for he did not usually possess such patience; yet he still hoped to unseat his daughter and gain from her help in his work, however distantly. This together with a vague sensation of guilt, a very distant sense of being used by his own spiritual thrust, a beginning of a suspicion of its actual source, had made him quiet for such a time.

 

As to Margaret, however, even now, was not finished, and like a waterfall from heavy rain, she surged onward.

 

Does God experience a need ? she asked, to deceive, to mock, to hurt, to obtain satisfaction of any kind in any way from His creation. Need! In fact, she proceeded, if the Being, the spirit of which you talk,  had a NEED FROM creation, then incomplete, he is a creature himself. With the actual imparter of existence to the world of limited things, however, God,  this Being has no such need. Nothing is His limit, nothing is His need, nor can any impel Him who complete, is built in no system, contained by no impoverishment, seduced by no lust, not even the 'need' to deal with time as a limit.

 

Over time, He is, and before time, He has been, and when our sort of time reaches the end of its road, He is One, the same, as an author remains, however many books he may write.  Nothing is His requirement, and He acts as He pleases, always consistent as is the actual verified fact in the Bible.

 

In fact, we find that He acts in mercy, that is, in love. It is not however to fill the empty pockets of His nature, as if system were His mode, immersion in it His misfortune. On the contrary, the love is like that; and indeed in its essence, human love tends to resemble this. Love is like that. It is love which flows out into creation, not by necessity, but by option, not to gain, but to give. When even in mankind, a mother gives in order to get, our sense of her love is diminished. She gives for the sake of her child.

 

That is one reason why in Christ's own speech you see it emphasised so much and so often, that LOVE GIVES. It does not force as if it HAD TO GIVE, nor does it stay forever, where it is refused. The love of God is pure, chaste and though impelling it is not compelling as if to take by force, the prototype of rape. Rather it goes as far as death to rescue, having the good of its object, man, at heart. In that sense, the esteem man still seeks for love, is real, reliable; but it is not lovely when lust seizes it and merely uses the word!

 

Where have we come then ? Being what He is, He does it and says it, and His word is truth. He distorts Himself for nothing, for He is always what He wants to be, and beyond His creation of time, needs nothing, is what He is and does what He does, take it or leave it. Before Abraham was, I AM, said Christ. There is nothing derivative, and time itself is subservient to its Creator. The Author of all does not learn from his books, but gives a booking plan for man in His revelation. It does not change, any more than He does. Without Him, there would not even BE such a thing as truth to proclaim, this way or that. His word is it, and it is impermeable, impervious and pure.

 

Did not Christ make this clear in his parable of the house built on sand, and the one on rock! Hearing His words is not an option of life style, but part of what it is to be a creature, and to stay as made; or if spoiled, to be restored by redemption, the work of God Himself. What happens when you ignore the need for automatic gear oil to be replenished ? Not relish but wreckage. Service is according to design, and wilful ignoring of what you are is one of the ways the world makes itself more and more nearly unlivable as a whole!

 

Duplicity and deviousness does not help, whether from man or devil. The results are the same. Departure of any kind from what God Himself is, merely makes of any being supposed to be He,  either a mere imagination, controlled or impelled by the warping of creation, or else the duplicity of the devil. It is not God in fact, only in name, and hence not Creator of all things. Therefore the care of such a being is not therapeutic, but dissolute. There is a being dissatisfied with reality, placed within it and subject to it.

 

Hence worship of false gods, philosophical substitutes, political inventions, emotional self-presentations, being atheism in reality, has similar results. What it is about is not God, whereas God is ignored, bypassed or His name abused. The thing worshipped in such a case, not being God, leaves the misled effectively atheists! The result is the same.

 

I am then an atheist ? But what if I find my God in myself ?

 

You began. End of story.

 

You are limited. End of story.

 

You are part of an external system, end of story.

 

You are subject to clash within, as perhaps now! end of story.

 

In God, however, dissonant elements are absent, being mere anthropomorphism, as if to make some pseudo-adolescent fizz into the divine being; for there is NO dissonance where there is all available without limit and all is met, with a Being subject to none, deprived of nothing, knowing all and for whom time is merely a novel, as far beneath Him as the earth from Everest. Time itself, as we have it,  is a patience mechanism for those to be tried by it, like you dad, and like me.

 

As to God, however,  He is limited by nothing; or else what you have in mind is not God at all, and subject to the limits of the One who is. That One has neither time nor other limit to circumscribed Him. Time passage is His book; He is beyond time, and made its limitations. The only 'god' who is limited by time is the devil, and his godliness is not only zero, but exceedingly negative! For God, time is a book written, a passage in a thing called creation. Limitless, He is free.

 

He does however circumscribe man, and to break your own circle, if you like it that way, to seek to break out, is merely to be in disarray,  to become deformed.

 

In fact, this all-wise immutability of God is empirically attested by Jesus Christ, the word of God biblically, in that ONLY book which empirically endures in all its truth for all time, in advance of man in its formulations, in its predictions, in its analyses of all things, never wrong, always ahead of the latest knowledge. NOTHING impinges negatively on it; and it exposes all things continually, and the more so as prophecy becomes history, never more spectacularly than now, except in one instance. When was that ? it was of course when God became man, so that man, not in dream, but in reality, might become a friend of God and know PRECISELY what God was doing, and he himself was doing by more means than many had imagined even possible.

 

Be practical, Margaret, Hu virtually exploded.

 

Prophecy is practical; purity is practical; immutability is practical since you always know precisely where you are, and have no starts! In personality, it is practical also.

 

In psychiatry, we have nothing to compare or compete with such a new personality as God promises to make in John 3: one divinely HEALED,  and not merely made into something different; one pardoned and unprogrammed from the delusions either of degradation inherent, or aspirations incredible.

 

It works, better than pills, and beyond all philosophy, and is rational as nothing else is or even could be. Freedom can find no other source for itself, than that of going beyond the limitations of a conferred personality, and this occurs ONLY when the Creator has one available, the consummation and restoration of what it was in the first, brought by His own knowledge where it belongs, so that man is not auto-limited as to what he wants, by the bonds of what he is.

 

This way, freedom is real, responsible is the same, and meaning is conferred to the uttermost. It is for this, necessary that  a new life is able to be instituted by One Capable of its 'creation' , as in II Corinthians 5:17 and following, and to be obtained by means not self-negating, but divinely bestowed. Nor does any religion offer as a gift, such a donation as this, except in Christ.

 

Quite simply, it matches logic, it matches need, it works. This and not some political manoeuvre is the need for mankind. Traffic policemen for lunatics and philosophic drivers in artistic drawings looking like cars are not effective; you need the authentic that actually relates, to be practical. With cars, you need good drivers, real cars that cohere,  and a good way. With man, the need is no less. It is practical, principially correct and provided dramatically, emphatically and prophetically in Christ, His coming and actions described in detail for centuries, in some cases, for millenia before He performed!

 

Sensing a moment to charge, Hu questioned this.

Oh most noble and wise daughter,

he cried, with a drama only partly ostensible,

HOW could even that astute daughter of mine KNOW such a thing,
that nothing else COULD be as rational as your Christ and His word!

 

Simply, she replied with a calm which was felt as if it were a soothing stream of crystal water, and a stimulating ocean breeze simultaneously, it is for this reason.

 

Since God is there as the initial Spirit,

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and since a growing God means a bypassing of the issue,

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and this actual Spirit who actualised mankind both is and must be immutable,

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being all He desired before all time,

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time being an item which is a waiting sort of thing, inhibitive to man
and thus not to God, who has no limits and none to impose or even impart them:

then certain things follows.

 

Thus it is then that the ONLY way ANYTHING can be known as absolute truth,
rather than reaction to events and inheritance, is by Him.

If there were no absolute truth, knowing it would be excluded a priori.
Further, unless you have access to it, you are in wisdom, dead.
Moreover, unless HE provides it to you, your limits remove it, your sin opposes it, and thus it is essential, as Christ said, to know that in the last analysis, HE has chosen you, not you Him! If it were otherwise, then the superior person being superior in perception, would merely achieve what was inherently better enabled; and besides, none without God can appreciate Him before the eyes of the mind are opened.

 

Thus one Creator, with one Gospel, a gift, with one love for all, but one choice of His own, expressive of love, but not aggression, fulfils all, meets all and glories in evidence.

 

You see, Dad, unless HE uses His own power to gain access to you, and to overcome your inherent limitations and philosophic presuppositions and preferences, yes and prejudices and ignorances, then you will be a pollutant filter, and absolute truth itself will still be beyond you. YOU will be its tomb as far as your own personality is concerned.

 

To be more like the womb, you need to be TOLD, by the Truth. The only way this can happen is by revelation, and the only rational possibility with that is by evidence. Evidence of what ? Of Him, and then that this necessary preliminary to man knowing the truth, is found in one place and not another. The Bible is the only one rationally attested, amply verified and impressive in coverage, correlative to such a source as God and to the requirements of His power in consistency and persistence; and the power of its attestation is so infinitely beyond the actual powers of investigable human intelligence, that it is simply - accept this or follow a lie.

 

Do I follow a lie, then Margaret ?

 

Hu's words for the first time began to have something as close to a suppliant tone as he ever permitted himself.

 

Margaret felt a strong impulsion of humility and pity. His self-restraint so far had clearly been in measure, miraculous, and she was beginning almost to hope ... that perhaps, his eyes were being opened.

 

Now she responded to his words, and looking at Cloe with expressiveness, turned to him and in an intimate sort of way, not without a plea of its own, spoke gently to him.

 

Dad, I am not your judge, and it is by no means a matter of my merit that my eyes are opened. Yet the word of God is my judge and yours, as John says in John 5:42ff., 12:48ff.. If you reject it, then lie rules you, whether you know it or not. You may not be gripped by any conscious lie in such a case, but the status then becomes no better. Because they did not receive the love of the truth, God sent them an active delusion! this is the word of Paul in II Thessalonians 2.

 

John, as seen in  I John 2:223  boldly declares this:

 

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"Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ ?
He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son.
Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either;
he who acknowledges the Son, has the Father also."

 

Nothing else even COULD be true. Without it, you have a God of conflict, at war with His own deeds and words, a mere creation, silent in the slack, matching His impossible self with ogrish creations. They not unexpectedly are then at war with each other, and the end is sure as power increases! It does increase as time permits aggregation of knowledge, has increased and will increase until it decreases in the final terrifying clash and clangor of open conflict, as in the multiple sclerosis of the mind, enervated and anxious, and in judgment, all three. Men's hearts failing them for fear is not only metaphorical either! Luke put it millenia ago, what had to come, does come and is increasingly apparent, at recorded in Luke 21:26.

 

In practice, man has had long practice, and is now practised in self-deception to the point you could offer him a spiritual anti-biotic and he would love to decline it. It is an anti-sin capsule in Christ however, which works practically; but man prefers slow but increasingly international death amid squalid wars and odious tantrums, Islamic terrorist, Communist, nationalist, internationalist or whatever other fad takes the mind of sinning, straying man.

 

As in practice, so in principle. Truth is voided, but not void,  in such a melody of malady, and your version with it. In this pandemonium of philosophy and deception,   cause is defunct and logic with it, magic is implicit, and irrationality with it.

 

In truth however, you have the Spirit of God who knows all, revealing why He did it, confirming it, and fulfilling the inherent necessity that He speak, since not to do so would mean an impossible caricature of God, a mere system-tossed contrivance of thrust and counter-thrust, a product in a system, a mess-maker and a clash in action, a mere creation of the mind, with alien components first invented and then imported into that invention. But God has spoken, has provided remedy, is resisted even in the remedy, and continues till the appointed time for man, like a river rushing to the giant falls, comes to its moment.

 

God beyond all time, IS and being at all, is for ever. What is in discord because in folly, is covered as was creation from the first, by His power; for He is beyond it. In His power He provides His divinely unique and uniquely divine remedial approach, granting freely what is necessary to CHANGE man in the heart, and to bring him back to God. He does this with a payment man himself could not in his sin, ever make, for when YOU are the debt, with what will you pay ? This gift, grant and remedy is the GOSPEL.
A god without the Gospel is thus not a god at all, and all things cohere in one: the Bible, the Christ, their mutual and individual self-attestation and their remedial unity. This is the work and way of Him who IS God.

 

This, my father, is what I present, better than any pill, the underlying need before any cure that lasts into eternity, the necessary remedy, both logically and personally, and the greatest and most desired result.

 

Let me emphasise one thing. It is in fact only when the site for the divine speech to man, the information handbook, the Creator's provision, is found to be independently so profound in thought, prediction, retrodiction and so powerful in action, with the prescription of remedy for man, who is deemed the culprit, not his Maker, that one may rest in certainty: no other logical possibility being in existence.

 

It is when the Christ does no less, but more, that the threefold cord is presented. It is then that the personal side of things, the peace which is appropriate to a God of all knowledge and power, the joy which comes with the certainty that one has found Him, and the continual verification in practical, personal, empirical life of His words and promises, becomes logically relevant in its own order.

 

Who should have thought, sighed an unrepentant Hu, that I could have so logical a daughter! That, now, that is something I literally COULD not have imagined!

 

But Margaret, with a sort of combination of maternal instinct for Harry, his very life under threat from his puissant father,  and a seizing of reins for once in order to confront her father before he did more evil, persisted. She could neither be humoured nor cajoled, diverted nor divested. She pursued the point like a terrier with its ball; but her ball - it was Harry's life!

 

As you have it, she declared, all in imagination, nothing demonstrable, everything awry from your mix-up of beginning and end, war and peace, folly and wisdom, while you disdain reality in the interests of hoped-for personal power: it is neither rational nor scientific. It is all imagination.

 

As history has shown, that sort of thing is a syndrome. It gets nowhere in the end, and is a cause of vast suffering on the way, mere delusional hope, dismissing the necessary power of God, His assured love and immutable wisdom in vague postulates contrary to the realities of His power and the certainty of His truth.

 

It violates love, so natural to man, to family, and makes of grown men the very counterfeit of love in their militant massacres, their cunning treacheries, their arrogant hauteurs and their self-interested pursuits. It is a moral quagmire, infested with dying rats, which is at odds with all the highest and noblest thoughts and instincts of man.

 

When you test it in material ways, it is in precise contradiction of the entropy which is to be SEEN. Degradation is the automatic, not construction of designs, gratis.

 

When you look at it in terms of personality syndromes, your sort of approach is in precise conformity with the tragic failures which pock-mark history, the systems and persons which and who, elevating themselves, routinely fall either to the logic of forthcoming generations, to the sword or power of some other body with some other dream,  or to both. Fallen they are when they stood erect, and their structural weakness had only to be awaited till they fell like cracked images, made that way from the first, pursing their own volitions, like vomit going where it will. It is a matter of ejection of rejects, self-imposed by self-deception or direct deception of others.

 

All such things are

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a listless loss and neither rational nor productive,

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a mere twist of truth.

 

It is as if someone wanted to build a car,

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and disdaining the confirmed principles of engineering, duly tested,

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which are involved, hoped in imagination for something good,

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and seeking to manipulate the employes,

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made by order of personal magic a maestro machine

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to replace the necessary agents of production.

 

'Principles' won't do either.

 

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It is not principles which produce the world, but exhibit its conduct.
 

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To verbalise how things go is not to make them!
 

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To use methods is not to make what uses them or to find the One who did.

 

In short dad, psychological evasion does not create logical reality, and dreamy beings being developed by unknown forces, do not create worlds, but only paranoid ...

 

Oh, so I am paranoid now ? asked her father, a glow to his glower suffusing his now puffing face.
She had hit a sort of psychological facial nerve, and reaction was explosive. Paternal affection seemed now finally to have imploded. He mused on this very point, being immensely self-aware, just as he was dead to God.

 

Did I say that ? Remind me! she retorted in disgust.

 

You were going to say ...

 

How do you know what I was going to say ? Is your Spectre telling you! she chided.

 

Well go on, say what you are going to say, and let's finish this delightful discourse! he sighed with a hideous sort of cluster of emotions, rage, fury, frustration, admiration and despair, slight hope for his daughter mingling with determination and relief in ruses which he could implement in their time, were it necessary.

 

Hu had long since learned that his imaginative daughter had the full flow of the volcano when in motion, and when she was also concerned in her heart, it flowed for miles; and he even almost respected her for this imperative, since he felt one in himself as well, but surely ... surely not what she followed. He braced himself for the next wave of daughterly impacts.

 

Dad, there is a trend, a dynamic, a progression, a procedure in certain mental syndromes, and I use the term 'mental' in the sense of applying to the mind, not in some other. Having imaginary beings, and inspirational drawings to something which is not what now is, but which it is firmly felt is going to be, is one of the dynamics of ideology which can translate itself into psychology with profound detriment.

 

It disturbs logic, making some kind of dream-being a prod for production on earth, not codified, not clear, not based in any reason, not in accord with any evidence, contrary to all reason, a dream factory never seen, its works never known, its ways never found, its ideas often held, its results always destructive in the end.

 

In a way, it can become like a little boy who wants to BE a car, or a factory; but it is not enough to want, and this is a demeaning to what he is, deferential to what he is not, nor ever could be. And it is well that he cannot be such a degraded relic of what he in fact is: a boy a car! a man a program! mankind under the witless rule of dreams using force, and not imagination,  to ensure their survival. Such dreams as these are facing mankind with his untimely and unseasonable end!  With the boy-car,  as with the man-program, it is if he were some dreamer and not able to use what he in fact has, for want of realism.

 

This sort of thing, appearing with appeal in the mind of man, it is what Jesus called a 'leaven' and is more deadly than Aids.

 

Persons who follow such things in the presence of actual power, such as is yours institutionally, as in the Earth Unity Force, can wreak havoc. In the end, the error of thought, combined with the personal aspiration, leads inexorably sooner or later, either to remedy from restorative forces to bring the mind back to reality, with due repentance; or else to delusion.

 

This has dynamics of its own, which may as II Thessalonians 2 reports, be quite capable of being divinely judged by the intensification of its own bluster. One of the most common forms is paranoia; another is schizophrenia; a third is manic-depressive states in which aspiration like a pendulum, stirs. Then, desperation in view of the delusive character of the hope, jars. It stirs, it clashes, it lifts, it dumps.

 

Internationalising it has little appeal! It is only one more of the programs, soon to become pogroms, for all that is untrue, needs force in the end, before judgment finally arrives.

 

The syndrome indeed has even more spectacular depths.

 

Thus, multiple personality is also a possibility as is demon-possession, where what is, at first, a charming comrade in arms becomes the ground not of some super-man personality, but of a split personality in which dream runs one part, and need another. That presumably is one of the many reasons why Hitler fell. Illusion became delusion, and delusion failed to match reality, which bit him and that hard! It addled his thinking, so that when real opposition struck, he became unstuck, being basically destablised in himself. Thus he wildly sacrificed 300,000 or so troops to be surrounded in the Stalingrad days, being ready for victory without ground, and so grounded without victory.

 

It is not pretty, and it is a matter of syndrome on the one hand, and good sound reason for it, on the other.

 

But I, interjected an ominously fiery Hu, I shall become this final product of this spirit, a man of intelligence with supernatural power, which somehow, is within us all, and around us all. I shall employ computing augmentation to my very person, with inbuilt capacities past belief, and as one for all, shall surpass all, and I shall become it, the emblem and summit for man. Then there will be peace. Then others can share in my findings and my becomings, and the whole system will change.

 

Dad, you are sounding more and more like the delusive being in II Thessalonians 2, whop is found 'showing himself that he is God'. To be the Beginning you have to precede people who start by being born in a system which they did not create, and exceed people who die in a system which they do not control. This you are forever prevented from doing, since you BEGAN and are in it!

 

Talk of becoming 'it' is mere evacuation of reason. How is a product the Producer, the temporary the eternal, the recipient to be the Donor, or the limited the illimitable God in His comprehensive knowledge and overarching address by which you so much as be.

 

'It' has all the intelligence for ever, and has existed for ever since nothing cannot produce it, and less than the requirements of causation for mind, matter and spirit and its rational co-ordination of systems, and its spiritual co-ordinations of understanding, its reciprocal impacts and thus interfaces and all their adjustments: this will not bring us to be.

 

Yet we are.

 

As Margaret continued, Hu's eyes were on the ceiling, as if trying to find some beckoning which would obliterate the words of his daughter, and evacuate him from her post at his side. He was a surprising mixture of courtesy, which sometimes seem to leap significantly over the bounds of policy, and ruthlessness; and perhaps the fact that Margaret was his own family and very gifted in her profession, instilled a measure of patience in him. At all events, she was not yet finished, and his ears winced at her words.

 

You can no more become this Being than you can become history, or novels, or theatrical entertainment,  she stated. All these things have their creators, their sufficient causes, and you, you have birth and death, limitation of intelligence and necessity of growth. The only question ? It is this: into what you are growing! Indeed,  if some myth is your milieu, what in the world CAN and MUST that do in the end, to your very reason ?

 

Build on sand, and you fall.  That is all. There is a recognisable syndrome in this, with logical grounds and it is empirically observable throughout history. I would not like to see you attracted to this kind of mental drug, which has more than some others in destructive potency, since its source, its diabolical source, its created spirit of endless lust for power,  and for pawns towards that end.

 

It is this which, ultimately,  helps you to be suggestible. It is as a pawn, then, that you end, if you proceed, not a prince. That is a burst like a water pipe ... spectacular only for a moment.

It is also an ultimate irony, that the grandest becomes the puppet of a mere contorted creation, the god of this world, less worthy for a man to follow than his own dog!

 

Precious Margaret, you must be so intelligent so to taunt me.

 

Dad, you vaunt, and my medical desire to help may seem a taunt; but it is ice water on a fevered brow.

 

Dinner, Cleo. I have had enough of this your daughter, and for that matter, your son.

 

You would not hurt Harry in any way, in his career or other aspects would you dad ?
I know you value women enough to feel safe myself.

 

What I will do, I will do; and when I find it convenient to have women as my deity, I will let you know.

 

Heaven forbid that you regard us as deities, said Cleo quietly. We, Margaret and I,  are creations who love our Creator, and find in Him the truth which bred in love, brings peace when the action taken through His own kindness is received; and so He is our God. On His part, the action has been to show us HIS way, in the Saviour from sin, and Lord of life, duly foretold, all fulfilled in person and in history itself;  and His words still being fulfilled.

 

This is the divine answer, Cleo acclaimed: Not the visionary compulsion to make gods out of things that come and go.

 

Hu felt an impulse to roar out of the room, as if in his 8 car escort party in some far-off country, but realising that divorce and de-familisation (a useful little social term, he felt, since it almost managed to suggest removal not only of family but of familiarity with them) were now near, and lusting for the admiration and praise of sycophants, he restrained it.  Adopting a bored air, therefore, he proceeded to prepare for dinner.

 

Harrying Harry was one thing; managing Margaret was quite another. There was arising in Hu a certain distaste for femininity. This was rather significant in view of Daniel 11:37. Like so many, he was beginning to prefer the power to manage men, to find their company gratifying, rather than deal with the race as it had been created.

 

A certain warping began to move within the confines of his idolatrous pile, his personal Parthenon with its pantheon of forces and oddments of powers: it was a desire to control everything, be everything, have nothing outside his province, to sire everything and be ‘sir’ to all. He was on target for II  Thessalonians 2:2-4, and yes, 2:9-10. Will, he felt would prevail, without all this thought. He would show them.

 

Passion, despising truth, was working with indeed a certain spiritual assistance from beyond this mortal frame, but it was not from God! Hu sensed it, but he had no sense at all of what it actually was!

 

Like plus and minus, for any given figure in accounting, the sign represents merely a little directional change; but the difference in direction is profound. Credit and debit. God and the devil ? it is all super-natural; but the sign, whether that of the Cross or of pressure to presume, it makes all the difference.

 

As to Hu, he already FELT different.  Tiring of truth because of desire, he was moving faster than space-craft, and indeed an unsavoury spectre lacking power to create, was giving him thrust. Its creativity was as inadequate for leading him wisely as for instituting mankind initially, an imaginary inhabitant of the creation, a philosophic toy made by man, not engaged in making him or anything else, a magical contrivance, without ground, without effect, the voice of delusion.

 

This spectral shadow from the mind of man projecting power without evidence, while ignoring the place of power multiply attested in the Creator of designs that know no increase and show no way for it: this was his teleological myth. The very surfeit of irrationality and the delusion of vagrancy, it was like a living epitaph, waiting for inscription on his tomb! Indeed what better inscription than this, for Hu as for his many comrades in arms: Dead when divorced from foundation. How well it served to remind one of the cartoon of a man falling happily through the clouds towards earth, at ease with himself, but slightly mystified as he looked around and saw many others also falling … but with this difference, THEY had parachutes.

 

Meanwhile, to get back to earth, it was in that saturnine shadow, like that of a stingray by the fishing pier, that there lurked something real enough. It was that devitalising parasite of spirit, deluded with aspirations of grandeur, delighting in the idea of the indomitable, deadly in shame, gross in desire, that forlornly lost and insanely brilliant spirit, the devil himself. Do not the bacteria find acceptable  the tissue devastated by virus invasion ? does not the devil enjoy the spirit lost in delusion, now ready for adoption!

 

Just as the devil entered immediately in Judas at the scene of the Last Supper, so Hu became a mere puppet of the drives of deceasing personality, dead to life, one of the living dead not only in status, but in dynamic, cunningly supplied by the devil. Dynamically dead, delusively activated, like a driverless car, a rudderless ship: disjoined from the necessities of spiritual life, he was conjoined to a thrust of death, like a man demented, driven by hideous lust. His was a funereal courtship with a coffin, gold-lined to be sure: but an enveloping destiny, scarcely to be desired.