The Eternal War

Timothy Birdnow "Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" 2 And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" 4 But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked" Genesis3: 1-7 A recent Appeals Court decision in Massachusetts overturning the Defense of Marriage Act illustrates quite plainly the differences between Conservatives and Liberals. Richard Viguerie, writing in Conservative HQ http://www.conservativehq.com/article/8233-marriage-two-very-different-world-views made the following observation: "What the court in Massachusetts and courts in California that have also acted to strike down DOMA and bans on same sex marriage are really saying is that the government must divorce law from morality or moral standards. If the argument that the law should be values-free holds, then that means any behavior consenting adults freely agree to should be legal. At some point, Americans must affirm that the law is a means of organizing society to reflect a certain set of values. Conservatives must begin to make the case now that if the law and moral judgment are divorced, then rather than protecting society’s most fundamental institutions -- such as marriage and the family -- the law will become nothing more than a means of picking winners and losers in commercial relationships." End excerpt. He is absolutely correct, and this is so fundamental a point that we often lose sight of it in the war that is being waged. And it is a war - a very old war. Revelation 12:7 - And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels Ever since there has been a war, a war between those who would uplift and honor the individual and the collectivist, the believer in the power of the State, the usurper of the authority rightly belonging to God. This belief has taken many forms over the centuries; Animism, Pharoahism, Roman style Emperor worship, the Divine Right of Kings, Karl Marx's view of the inevitable march of history, Nazism, Scientism, Materialism, etc. They take different forms, but spring from the same root; Mankind and individual men seeking to be as God. The first, most fundamental authority that any would-be divinity must assert is over the free will of his fellow man. Men must be forced into a straightjacket, forced to obey. Every knee must bend, lest the charlatan be exposed as a mere mortal. This is the root of Progressivism. The notion of a collective, of a populace joined together as one, holds great appeal to many because it suggests that burdens may be shared and trials limited, and so a large segment of the public is willing to accept an intrusive State in return for freebies. It is the carrot baiting the rabbit trap. It masquerades as compassion, freeing the individual from his or her personal duty to God and his fellow man and outsourcing it to the State. It offers the easy way out. But, like most easy ways out, it leads down the path of destruction. But the appeal is undeniable. And especially with the miracles wrought by modern science, Mankind is now able to compete with the Most High on what appears to be an equal footing. Jesus cured the lame, the blind, the leper. Science has cured many lame men, given sight to many blind people, and has largely eliminated leprosy. Consider Smallpox; wiped away completely by science. With such a tool, why does Man need God? That at least is the thinking of so many. And so the balance of power in the ancient war shifted. Those who seek to be as gods have a powerful new tool to give themselves that particular illusion. But gods need worshippers, and those worshippers are found in the dependent classes, in the students in the universities, in the welfare recipients, in the recipients of government programs. Like any good deity, the welfare state provides its beneficience to the poor, the lame, the weak, in return for their worship. That worship is at the ballot box, in the polls, and in submitting to the authority of the intelligentsia and the governing class. It bears little difference to the worshipers of the Pharoah, or of the Roman Emperor, or to the concept of the King as divinely anointed. The State is god, and one must obey the high priests of that god or face wrath. Therein lay the difference between Christian communal living and the modern collectivism; the early Christians motto may have been "from each according to his heart" instead of "from each according to his ability to each according to his need". The early Christians believed in FREE WILL. You chose to give as much or as little as you felt you were called to give. In the end charity was a matter of choice. In the Utopia of the Progressive there is no choice; the State forces the coin from your hand and redistributes it as it pleases the lords. The modern welfare state pretends to be compassionate, but it is not. It strangles free will, both of the "giver" and the recipient. How can the recipient walk away from what is provided? How can he better his circumstances when he is provided with all he needs? Where is his choice? Only a fool turns down free money. This battle between free men and slaves of the State goes back a long, long way. Now, there are conservative atheists and liberal christians, make no mistake about it. The conservative atheist still holds to a standard, a concept of Natural Law, a vision that there is something greater than the human will, the Nietzchean Superman, that compels Mankind. In that regard they believe in a form of god, at least one that is not Man. To the conservative atheist the concept of immutable rights stemming from Natural Law (and what is Natural Law but the Law of God?) trumps the will of men. Therein lies the difference between the two; the atheist conservative believes in a higher power, something greater than himself. The liberal believes Man is the sole definition of reality, that rights and duties, morality and faith and reason are all things granted by the collective, and that they can be withdrawn by an act of will by the collective, or by the leaders of that collective. Liberal religious are like that, too; they see us "all in this together", believe that we will "join hands and walk out of Hell together" as though we have no individual nature. The Liberal religious believe in a corporeal salvation only. Theirs is a Gospel of this world, a belief that our sole purpose is to feed and clothe and house and care for the physical aspects of life with no real thought of the ultimate spiritual destiny of people. As a result they are duped into believing that the State is the best tool for providing these things to the populace. It's so much easier to believe that we can simply all share what we have with the poor, and that the collective will can make this happen. It ignores our individual nature, the fact that we are individual souls in this world with spirits that ultimately lead to a hereafter. Feed the poor by simply taking money from those who have to pay for it sounds like compassion, but it ultimately destroys any incentive to produce. God made Man to labor, whether we like it or not. kindly removing that requirement may seem like a kindness, but it ultimately brings misery. The poor are in the most miserable of conditions in the welfare state; their lives are empty and purposeless. They live for nothing more than their government checks to give them the tools to kill time. Life is an eternal cycle of waiting to die. The conservative believes first and foremost that there is an objective standard, a reality that must be served by Man, who is not the master of all things. And that brings us back to the Viguerie piece about gay marriage. If a thing is defined not by a concensus of human beings but by it's external reality, a reality based on the mind of God, then we have no right redefining it. Marriage has a particular meaning and purpose. It is not about pleasure, nor about legal benefits, nor about self-fulfillment. It is a specific thing. That thing was defined in the Bible: Gen2:23-24 The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh" And they become one flesh by becoming a family, by having children, and not by getting tax incentives or whatnot. Marriage is not an utilitarian thing, but a sacred thing, something ordained by God first and foremost. Yes there are purposes to marriage, but it is not just a mechanism (although it is the backbone of all civilization, the fundamental social unit, and as such was the object of disdain to Karl Marx, who wanted to ban it and replace it with the State) but is a condition, a spiritual condition. We can no more substitute another man for the woman than we can substitute an ostrich, or a machine. Man is not purely a carnal entity, but a spiritual one. There the liberal differs; Man is but a complex biological mechanism. Free will is nothing but an illusory biproduct of neural interactions, of slavish conditioned responses that are built into our central nervous systems and our DNA. In short, we don't really exist to the liberal in any real fashion. Our lives are illusions created by ancient particles that simply recycle endlessly in an eternal dance of quantum mechanics. As such our wishes and desires, whatever they may be, should be fulfilled because there is no good reason not to - except where those wishes oppose the ruling class. The ruling class wishes to be gods, and as gods they want the power to give pleasure to their worshippers. If you understand that you understand the entirety of Liberalism/Leftism/Progressivism. Man is but a machine, and yet he is also god, the definer of all things. It is a bizarre dichotomy, but then it is itself the product of a desire that goes back into the mists of time. The quote I began this essay with - the Fall of Man - bespeaks the most ancient lust for the power of the godhead, one that far too many still seek to satisfy. He was formed of dust, and yet he is the most high. Nietzche called it the Superman, the Triumph of the Will. All religions believe there is a path to immortality, and Liberalism is no different. Most will perish as they should, selected for extinction by Darwin's Evolutionary god, but some can transcend their fate, become the rulers, the leaders, the kings of the Earth. It may not give them personal immortality, but they can be part of the revolution of Man, the evolution of Man into a higher being. Or so they believe; the reality is they are but part of the tyranny of that fallen angel who misleads the whole world. They repress the individual in order to free him to follow his lusts. They oppress the followers of the Almighty God to follow a new god, one born of man and his puny will. So there is the choice, stark and grave. It is the same choice that was offered to Lucifer and the Angels in some distant eternity, and the same offered to Adam and Eve in the Garden. It is the same choice that has been at the heart of every conflict throughout Man's history. It is the choice offered to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah. It is the same choice offered to Jesus Christ and to his disciples. It is the choice offered to us today. There is a war, and it will go on beyond our time, until the parousia at least and even beyond that, until the final judgement. Welcome to the War!