Turning Their Backs

The more the people of this country turn their backs on the principles that made this country great, and blessed by G-d, the worse things will get.

And yet, our news media and many of our politicians and public figures, embrace values that are antithetical to the values that made America what it is. America is embracing the suicide of America. There are Americans cheering on the suicide of America.

If that is not the definition of f***ed up, I don't know what is.

Now for a lot of people, their response to my previous sentences might be that America isn't too great. We had slavery, we have income and other inequalities, capitalism has mutated into a rapacious monster, and yes sometimes when people's bad actions put police in a tough situation, those police aren't always as careful to preserve life (even the lives of criminals) as they should be. Hence our current situation with the death of George Floyd.

Let us set aside for the moment that the Left's solution to all that is more centralized State control, which invariably leads to stagnation at best if not outright tyranny at worst. How bad do things have to be when communism is your answer? Pretty damn bad, I guess. I thought we sorted out the issue of whether communism works when the Soviet Union fell.

However, just because your answers are terrible, doesn't mean your questions are always illegitimate. America is a place where innovation is at its best, where hard work and intelligence are frequently rewarded, but ALSO a hot mess constantly flirting with the prospect of civil war. America is a chaotic place.

Perhaps unexpectedly. the closest thing we've yet seen to "boogaloo" (civil war) wasn't right-wing militants waving guns, but left-wing militants waving Molotov cocktails. Who will drop the next shoe, remains to be seen. And at the same time that all this shit is going down, the first ever humans were launched aboard a commercially-made and partially reusable rocket. A great leap forward in manned spaceflight, created by a South African immigrant to America who had a dream about a place where anything was possible. A dream about the most forward-looking, scientifically advanced, and greatest spacefaring nation ever: America.

I am not saying that a return to the fundamental values of America will solve all our problems. The only thing that solves all problems is death. I AM saying that if we do not return to the core fundamental values of America, things will continually get worse and worse. What are these values?

1. Individual moral principles based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments. G-d is at the core of all these other values.

2. Limited government and individual responsibility. If the citizens are responsible, the government doesn't have to be. If the government is made responsible for everything, the citizens eventually lose their freedom. Humans are habitually morally corrupt and have limited insight into the truth: make sure you do not make any man or men too powerful or you will invariably regret it.

3. In line with #1, HONESTY. It used to be a value in America that people be forthright and frank in a helpful spirit. The corrosion of this value also leads to the corrosion of all others.

4. Duty. This value was abused in the various wars America got into that were often not justified and were for geopolitical reasons and empire building, and so it got a bad name. The devil loves to corrupt good principles to bad ends. You have a duty to country, to others, to self and most importantly to G-d. These are the guide-rails that keep our lives from going off-track.

5. Honor. This value was also frequently abused, often by the same people. Honor ideally means that you have a code of conduct for yourself and you stick to it, and you don't violate it for personal gain or to avoid the disapproval of others or because of peer pressure.

6. Preparedness and self-reliance. If some of these values sound like they come from the Boy Scout Handbook, well a lot of them are in common. Be Prepared. Be prepared in mind by anticipating problems that may arise. Be prepared in body by being strong and fit. Be morally prepared by studying wisdom (#8). Be capable of taking care of yourself and looking out for others in adverse situations. Connected to this is...

7. Be Thrifty. Money doesn't exist as a means to your pleasure, it exists as a means to your survival. Before you spend money on wants, make sure your needs are prepared for adequately. Save money against adverse conditions in the future.

8. Wisdom. This is actually not so much a traditional American value as a value I would like to see adopted as American.

As a Gentile raised in a fairly liberal family, what seems most remarkable to me about Judaism is their emphasis on studying wisdom. This is a value that is repeated throughout the Tanach. Part of moral preparedness is studying wisdom: read the Bible, contemplate the situations presented therein. Think about potential situations of moral conflict and how to resolve them. One of my criticisms of Judaism though is that they tend to take the opinions of their beloved dead rabbis as being more than what they are: opinions of men. Opinions of good men, I am sure, and probably worthy of study, but they were just men. Everyone must think these things through for themselves. If our society had a greater emphasis on teaching and exploring wisdom and ethics, we would be in a far better condition than we are.

9. Freedom. Part of our problem in a sense is that we are a country that has insisted on freedom from our earliest days. We are rebels by nature. However when freedom belongs not to intelligent disciplined responsible citizens but lawless deviant degenerate rabble, that's a real problem. And that problem has also existed from the beginning. The mobs in Boston prior to 1776 weren't all exemplars of American virtue. They too were often lawless rabble not opposed to a little looting.

Nevertheless, free men must insist: I belong to no government, I am nobody's chattel or slave, I am a free man and if need be I will die one rather than submit to slavery.

10. Service and charity. Now, just like duty and honor, charity has been abused of late by evil people. That is why I no longer give money to large charities or virtually any charities, because they are essentially pirates making money off of peoples' consciences. Which is pretty much the scummiest thing a human can do short of violence.

However the duty to serve the community and help the less fortunate remains. The more people shirk this duty, the greater will be the call for fathermothergovernment to step in, which they are just an even larger version of these corrupt charities that fatten themselves in the name of the less fortunate.

11. Justice. Justice both means freedom for the innocent and consequences for the guilty. In personal life, do not act such that innocent people will be affected unfairly. On a government level, rule of law. Judge people according to fair process and according to evidence.

12. Clean life. Drunkenness, drug use, sexual immorality and decadent levels of self-indulgence have never made anyone's life better. And don't give me that shit about pot being different: pot makes you stupid. It's a drug like the rest. If you need drugs as medicine (if you have glaucoma, or cancer,) that can be a legitimate use. Otherwise you're just a druggie, not different in kind from the heroin addict or the nymphomaniac or the alcoholic.

***

I challenge anyone to tell me how these values will somehow make America worse. Why then do large sectors of society (honestly, mostly the atheistic cynical sectors) not embrace them and sometimes openly deride them? Media reporting on the riots going on lately will mention social justice and racism, and not what is actually going on which is looting and pillaging. That is dishonest and immoral. The event of actual importance going on is violence and wanton destruction of property, and I am hard pressed to figure out a situation outside of total war where that is ever justified. But lies (#3) fall like rain these days.

The widespread embrace of these (old and new) American values truly would Make America Great Again.

The Neutralizers

In any society there exists people and organizations whose real function (whatever they may tell you) is to allay annoying anxieties or lull peoples' annoying conscience to sleep. They give outlet to your real concerns or bury annoying truths so as to make you feel better without actually changing anything.

These are the Neutralizers.

Neutralizers keep you from the dangerous tendency to actually do or change anything. They are priests and pastors, doctors and psychiatrists, political activists and charities.

You go to the doctor and tell him you feel that life is pointless. He gives you a pill, and the pill does indeed remove some of that, but whatever caused you to feel that way is unchanged. But hey, the pain is gone, that's what you care about.

You are really worried that humans may be damaging the natural world in terrible ways, and so you give money to a charity, like the World Wildlife Fund or (ugh) the Nature Conservancy and then you feel better, but the money mostly goes to the well-stuffed salaries of their leaders and sometimes even helps petroleum companies. The Nature Conservancy for instance quite often sells land that is donated to them or which they buy with donated land to people who will frack it for natural gas. But you feel better because in your ignorance you imagined that your money was actually going to help heal the natural world.

You go to church hoping that you will encounter the kind of Christianity of the early disciples or the Book of Acts, even though you certainly won't. What you will encounter are some soothing rituals and some nice conversation and coffee, and that's great, but you might be able to do that at your local Starbucks too (with better coffee.) You could achieve that at Starbucks more honestly perhaps, because you won't be lying to yourself (which virtually all us believers of whatever stripe do) that you are doing adequate service to G-d.

Go re-read the book of Amos, and then read it some more. You think this is just talking about the ancient Israelites?

Really?

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and

grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

~Amos 5:21-24

But I would not have you believe that the Neutralizers are just a sinister plot to keep us from changing anything. An evil conspiracy to maintain the status quo. Not at all. We WANT the Neutralizers around. We positively demand that they exist. If they didn't exist, we would create them. Because if we actually took responsibility for what is, we couldn't bear it. And if we acted on that responsibility, well, that could have very poor consequences for our standard of life, the respect of our peers, or even our physical well-being. If Jesus took responsibility, his reward was getting nailed to a tree. If Gandhi took responsibility, his reward was getting shot and killed. Taking responsibility can be very bad for our health.

Here's an example of some Neutralizers. You think abortion is wrong, so you go stand on a street corner in front of an abortion clinic with a sign. This saves approximately ZERO POINT ZERO lives.  But hey, you're doing something, right?

Some liberal one time (I don't have the exact quote on hand) said that pro-lifers cannot really believe that fetuses are human lives, or else they'd storm the place in a mob and tear down the doors and break the equipment with sledgehammers. If this really was the modern Auschwitz, the modern Dachau, more clinics would have burned to the ground in the 46 years that abortion has been legal.

This of course ignores the fact that nobody stopped Auschwitz or Dachau either.

And the minute a pro-lifer actually does something, actually burns down an abortion clinic or shoots an abortion doctor, who is the first to denounce him as a terrorist?


Pro-life groups like Operation Rescue.


Even the name, "pro-life," gives them an out. They don't take violent action because they are Pro-Life! They are pro- everyone's life, and pro- everyone's property, and now everyone kiss nice and they will sit on the corner and pretend they are doing something!


Imagine we were back in slavery times, and someone set up a protest at a slave auction. And they said, "We are pro-freedom! We want more freedom! Voluntarily free your slaves, you slave owners, that would be very nice of you!" If that was the extent of the movement to free the slaves, we would still have slavery to this day.

No, they weren't called Pro-Free. They were called  ABOLITIONISTS.  John Brown wasn't Pro-Free.

The truth about most Pro-Lifers is not exactly that they don't believe the unborn are people. They may think that the unborn are less-than, but thinking that people other than yourself and your own are less-than is pretty common anyway. People care about themselves, their family, and their own circle. Everyone else is really less-than. Lots of Germans who stood by as Dachau burned corpses probably thought that Jews were really people. They were just less-than.

If the average Pro-Lifer is guilty of anything in his ineffectual defense of the unborn, he is guilty of breaking this commandment:

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.

Of course, aren't we all guilty of that?

"What Are You Doing Here?"

In the book of Kings, when Elijah starts heading for Mt. Horeb, he lies down and asks to die. Basically as far as he can see, the entire covenant of G-d with the Jewish people, the entire centuries-long project of Israel being G-d's chosen, has completely collapsed.

Both the northern Kingdom of Israel and even the southern Kingdom of Judah has fallen to worshiping false gods, spearheaded by the King of Israel, Ahab, and his wife Jezebel. Jezebel was a Canaanite princess from Sidon who was very much in favor of pagan gods and very much against the G-d of Israel. Jezebel commanded that the priests and prophets of YHWH be slain, to the point where Elijah thought he was the only one remaining.

Consider: the whole Exodus from Egypt, the miraculous plagues that caused Pharaoh to release them, parting the Sea of Reeds, G-d slaying their enemies, water from stone, and G-d himself speaking from Sinai (Horeb) to give His people His commandments. Now all for absolutely nothing? Israel was irrevocably apostate. Judah was irrevocably apostate. No wonder he laid down and wanted to die.

But he managed to make it to Horeb and he hid in a cave, the very same cave from which Moses pleaded with G-d not to strike down the Israelite people. Elijah though, he was having none of this mercy business. If anything he WANTED Israel to be struck down. He was beyond disgusted. Aside from all the pagan idolatry, King Ahab through his wife actually had a dude murdered so he could steal his vineyard. They were both continually doing evil, and everyone seemed pretty okay with it or even participating in it themselves. Israel had been cursed with a three year famine because of its evil, but that seemed to accomplish nothing. Moses had begged G-d not to obliterate Israel: in that same cave on that same mountain Elijah would have begged G-d TO obliterate Israel.

I find Elijah a very sympathetic character. I feel I can relate to him more than any other figure in the Bible. Nevertheless, it was G-d's will that Elijah intercede FOR Israel, not ACCUSE Israel. G-d wanted to be merciful. Elijah did not.

G-d called Elijah to the mouth of the cave. A terrible wind passes, but G-d is not in the wind. A great earthquake strikes, but G-d is not in the earthquake. A great fire swept over the mountain, but G-d was not in the fire. Then a still small voice.

These four things: wind quakes fire and the voice, are a parable of the nature of the world and the journey of Man in the world, and of its end. The world passes away like the wind. The prospect of death shakes like a quake. Judgment burns like fire. But all these things pass away. This world passes away like a dream. What is left is the voice, the Last Day, the Kingdom of G-d.

Elijah because he could not intercede for Israel any more, could not be Israel's main prophet anymore. So G-d commanded that he go to anoint new kings for Aram and Israel and then anoint Elisha as his replacement.

I can totally sympathize with Elijah. I would definitely want to take the first regularly scheduled chariot of fire out of that whole dog-and-pony-show. I very often feel that way myself in the modern world. If the chariot pulled up out front and an angel in the driver's seat asked, "want a ride out of here?" I might well say yes. But the important part of the story is G-d saying none of this lasts. This is just a blink in eternity.

So today there are so many horrible things going on, and the people seem completely godless, and so much seems lost. But none of that matters in the long run. It will all pass away forever one day.

Are Americans Canaanites or Israelites?

In the Tanakh, when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, children were also killed. When Jericho was destroyed, children were also killed, except the family of Rahab. When other cities were condemned to be destroyed, they were destroyed utterly and even their livestock along with the bodies and all their possessions were to be burned as a holocaust to G-d. Whether you regard such events as historical is irrelevant: we are peering into the theology of such a thing, not the history.

Now many if not most people who hear such stories would say that such things are horrendous and that's another reason for regarding the Tanakh as the product of a barbaric Bronze-Age people with no regard for human life. We have gone beyond such things now in our civilized age (as we abort our babies and drop bombs on children in other countries.)

However it is of a whole cloth with a pattern in the Torah and the Tanakh which I would like to call "the medicinal application of death." The Flood in Genesis (again, whether you believe it happened or not, we are talking theology not history) is the prime example of this. In that case, the whole world had gotten so rotten that the whole of humanity had to be destroyed, except for one righteous family. Obviously many children, almost all children on Earth, also died.

Evil is depicted in the Torah as a kind of infection, an infection that can be communicated down through families. This latter part is easy to see: men whose fathers were abusive or whose fathers were criminals are far more likely to be violent or criminal themselves. This is the actual meaning of the saying, "the sins of the fathers are on the sons." There are of course exceptions and this statement is not literally true (no one can actually inherit sins that are not their own,) but rather you are more likely to be evil yourself if you come from an evil line. Wicked families teach their children wickedness.

Deuteronomy is very clear about this "medicinal application of death," applied both outside the Israelite tribes and within it. Within the tribes, for those who are convicted of capital crimes including such things as pagan idolatry, it repeatedly says "wipe out the evil from among you." Jesus may have said "do not resist an evil person," but the Torah states differently. Kill them, with extreme prejudice, but through the scrupulous application of a process of justice. The penalty for falsely accusing someone of a capital crime is the same as for a capital crime: death. The idea being expressed here is clearly that, like a disease, if you do not expunge evil it will multiply. The sons and daughters of the unpunished wicked will likely go on to being wicked also. The image of evil being here described is like gangrene: chop off the finger to save the hand. Chop off the hand to save the arm. The sooner and more vigorously evil is opposed by force, including lethal force, the less damage will be done in the long run.

Outside the people of Israel itself, to the Canaanites, only the medicine of the Flood can apply. Evil has taken too deep a root:

"When the Lord your God brings you to the land

you are about to enter and possess, and He
dislodges many nations before you...
(list of Canaanite and other kingdoms) ...and the Lord

your God delivers them to you and you defeat

them, you must doom them to destruction:
grant them no terms and give them no quarter.

You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your

daughters to their sons or take their daughters

for your sons. For they will turn your children
away from Me to worship other gods, and the
Lord's anger will blaze against you and He
will promptly wipe you out. Instead, this is
what you shall do to them: you shall tear

down their altars, smash their pillars, cut

down their sacred posts, and consign their

images to the fire."

~Deuteronomy 7:1-5

To the children of Sodom, the children of Gomorrah, the children of Jericho, the children of these Canaanite kingdoms, how do you justify their deaths? They were presumably innocent. But children cannot live without their parents, and if they were old enough to live without their parents they were old enough to have assimilated the ambient evil of their environment. Their deaths not only meant being spared a life of wickedness themselves, but that future generations might be spared the curse of that evil. The evil nipped in the bud, the future clean and righteous. That's what they died for.

Of course Israel started breaking all these commandments almost immediately upon entering Canaan. They took Canaanites for their wives and adopted their gods, they spared their kings and even King Solomon married foreign and pagan wives. But that is a story for another time.

***

So lets turn it around on ourselves now.

I have been against abortion for decades, though not always as strongly as I now wish I had been. I actually don't remember a time when I was FOR abortion, even though I was raised liberal. But if those who are visiting the abortuaries are functionally just like the Canaanites or the residents of Sodom, should I be? They are sparing those children and future generations the inheritance of their evil ways. Is America a holy nation, or is it Sodom? Is America Israelite or Canaanite?

I expect like Sodom, it is a little of both, though perhaps a little better off than Sodom. When G-d told Abraham he was going to judge Sodom, Abraham asked that if there were any righteous there, would He spare it? He answered yes, but ultimately there was only one family of righteous there, Lot's family, relatives of Abraham.

America has an inheritance as a godly nation, but even that inheritance was mixed from the beginning. There were the devout Pilgrims and Puritans, and the lawless mercenary rabble in Jamestown and New Amsterdam (later New York.) In the time of the Revolutionary War, Boston which was founded by Puritans is depicted by most sources as a lawless and drunken town, prone to violence and rioting (even unrelated to conflict with the British) and as being controlled by street gangs with corruption rife. If the more religious immigrants to the New World were blessed by G-d, well, other immigrants were busy wearing that blessing thin.

Even if America was originally a godly nation, that horse has bolted the corral and fled to Alaska by now. We have to accept that the current condition of most of America is that of Canaan, of Egypt, of Sodom. Wickedness has triumphed over what godly inheritance we had.

So should we still be against abortion? For believers, absolutely and unequivocally, and we should teach that it is wrong in hopes that others will come to their senses. As perhaps the leaders in some States have: in Texas if abortion is not utterly banished it is the next best thing. We should still agitate for the abolition of abortion, in the hopes that the people will come to their senses about that and many other things.

But should we resist the Canaanites of this country killing their own to the point of force? Should we march into Canaanite territory and blow up their clinics? I was once sympathetic to such an idea, I am not sure I am anymore. If that Sodom of the East, New York City, kills ALL their babies, well that is fewer babies to be raised to be godless men and women. Which with a tiny number of exceptions they all would be. As much as it may hurt our more tender feelings, G-d's prescription for the godless and wicked is death.

Death, that saves future generations of humanity from the curse of evil. Death, that cleanses the world to be inherited by future generations of the righteous. It may hurt our hearts to say that, but that is clearly the prescription of the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament. From that point of view, the more babies that die in New York City, the fewer babies grow up to be wicked and to spread the disease of wickedness.

It's not their fault, it's their parents fault, and far be it from me to say that they SHOULD die. The thought of it hurts my heart. I am saying we should not prevent them to the point of force from doing it. Up until recently, I was of the opinion that terrorism against abortion clinics and abortion providers was absolutely justified.

Now I believe that if the Canaanites insist on murdering their own, we should tell them the truth, try to save what few we might, but not resist them to the death if they don't listen.

What about places like Texas, where abortion is on the verge of being abolished? We should fight tooth and nail, through political means, to make sure that it IS abolished. What is called for here is vigorous and if need be ruthless political action to make these few states the first states in which abortion is legally or de-facto ABOLISHED. Here, we don't need violence: we're winning.

It is far too late to make America a godly nation. We can still save some godly States though.

Lies

If I know that someone lies or deceives, that instantly puts them on the "do not associate" list. Even white lies are wrong and dishonorable.

Now, there may be cases where a person is so bad with language and with limited skill and maybe intelligence, that they lie because they cannot figure out the appropriate response. Kids do this all the time, through no particularly malign spirit, just because they are bad at language or want to avoid making you mad at them or others. They have not yet developed the character to be principled truth-tellers, and that's not really their fault. Other adult people, because of not being good with words or being of limited intelligence, might be in the same boat. Just as violence may be more common with people with low verbal skills who cannot voice their feelings well, lying may also be more common because they literally can't figure out what the right thing to say would be. So they lie.

More commonly, people lie because they are bad at processing interpersonal conflict or have a problem accepting blame or responsibility.

"Where's your homework Billy?" "The dog ate it."

This can indeed be a moral failing, but at least Billy didn't start his day intending to lie to his teacher. He was confronted with a shortcoming of his, and he lied in reaction to that. It was a reactive lie, not a proactive lie.

But if you lie when you truly don't have to, because lying has become just another tool in the toolkit, or you lie for personal advantage, then you have started walking down a dark road that leads to spiritual destruction. Just as bad is deception, even when it is not a technical lie but intended to mislead. We see both lies and deception constantly in advertising, business brochures, news, other media, and sales pitches of all kinds. Intentional lying and deception has become normalized, deception even more so because if you lie in a business deal, you could get sued. If you deceive cleverly, you can be safe even though you twisted reality all around. The functional problem with lying is that you can be caught in a lie. If you just deceive, you cover your ass better.

Our society just in general has zero cultural commitment to not lying or deceiving. "Everyone does it." If people were taught how to respond morally to difficult situations in childhood, even people who are not that bright with language could respond correctly to the temptation to lie. In addition, lying is a sign of bad character. It means you aren't adult enough and your coping skills are too poor to handle truth-telling. You are socially and morally retarded, a child not a man or woman.

Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. We hardly ever lie for the benefit of others, almost always for the benefit of ourselves at the expense of others. A lie is an assault, against the person lied to, and also against G-d.

G-d hates lies.

Saffron

A Saffron Field

This may not seem in keeping with this blog for me to talk about a spice (this ain't a cooking blog, or Dune for that matter) but bear with me.

Saffron is the world's most expensive spice. Great fields of it are grown, and for every acre 1-2 kilograms of the precious spice are collected. Laboriously, by hand. The whole plant grows just to yield three flower stigmas, three threads. 70,000 crocus flowers are required to collect just one pound of saffron.

What is the purpose of the saffron field? For the owner of it, the answer is obvious: to collect saffron. For the passerby, it is a scene of beauty: fleeting beauty, but beauty nonetheless. If there are such things as saffron pirates (which I bet there are,) the purpose is a quick buck from someone else's labor. For birds, perhaps a place to rest. For the government, a place to collect property taxes from. But none of these other purposes would exist without the farmer's purpose.

It seems to me that Life is rather like that saffron field in a couple senses.  One, if Life has a Purpose with a capital P, that doesn't exclude you from doing other things with life if you want. You are able to do those things, that doesn't mean you escape consequences any more than the saffron pirate might escape consequences, but nothing prevents you from reassigning its purpose to suit yourself. You may look at the saffron field and say it is beautiful and that is its only purpose for you. Not its purpose with a capital P, but it's purpose to you. But its beauty like all things will fade. G-d might be the farmer, but many purposes may arise and fade within that field of existence. None last except G-d's purpose.

And it is perhaps like it in another sense. Once this world, this universe, is done and gone, what will last? After the harvest in the saffron field, the saffron itself remains in the farmer's storehouse. The flowers die, the leaves wither. Snow may cover the ground. What are the threads of saffron in this context? What is left?

Many Jewish scholars say that the Kingdom of the Righteous, The World to Come, will be quite like this world, but without evil. In other words, you'll sleep in a bed, you'll eat apples (or perhaps manna,) there will be skies and clouds and trees. As maybe pleasant as that thought is, I am very skeptical of it.

The Kingdom of the Righteous might be entirely humanly inconceivable. Our sensory apparatus and our human brains may be entirely inadequate for it. What "threads" of us continue then in that realm? Much indeed that is human may not, just as the farmer does not store the petals of the flower or the leaves of the plant in his barn, but only the saffron threads. In this context, many of the saffron plants perhaps had no saffron, so nothing of them continues. As Jesus suggests in multiple passages, there is the wheat and there are the tares, and the wheat is stored and the tares (a kind of weed I guess) are burned. There is the narrow road and the broad road, and few are on the narrow road that leads to the next world. And for those that do continue, some part of them pertaining to the previous world is left behind and only the wheat kernels, or the saffron threads in my parable, continue to the Kingdom. Metamorphosis. Only the part of us that is most valuable to the Farmer continues. The part for which the world exists to begin with.

According to most Christian doctrine, in this case deriving from Greek philosophy, the soul exists from conception. Human life does indeed begin then, but I tend to think the soul does not. Rather, the soul is grown, planted, watered, it is not there to begin with. It is like the saffron plant that must grow its flower and open it and then the valuable part exists. The part for which we exist, for which the world exists.

New Children for G-d.

And what those Children will be like in the after-time, I cannot say, except that I doubt any human mind can conceive of it.

Despair and Faith

Faith is not a thing you believe. It's a thing you do.

I feel it all too often, especially at night when my energy is at low ebb, but sometimes from the start of the day too. The sour black taste of despair.

There is no shortage of things to despair about. There wasn't any shortage before, before the deaths and the looming economic conflagration that will no doubt cause death or great suffering to so many. So many. Personally I am relatively unaffected by the virus, except for knowing that I am precisely the kind of person it is most likely to kill. Over sixty, damaged lungs. When the despair is particularly black, I think it would kind of be a relief.

It is not just lately that I have felt that, though. There were a number of times in my life when I went to bed praying I would not wake up. I am not saying this so you will pity me, I am saying it so you will understand the realness of what I am saying.

It is not even necessarily adverse circumstances in my own life that is the cause, though as I grow older it can be harder and harder to feel good, to feel strong. Granted, if I always felt strong and able, the other things would be easier to bear up under. But usually if I bear up first, then I will feel strong.

But the feeling that is with me most consistently is the feeling that the world itself is a dark, malign place. I mean, fuck that, I KNOW that it is. We live in a world where people take their pleasure and sometimes their survival at the expense of the suffering of other people or other creatures or even that person their own selves. How many eat to bury their pain or take drugs to bury it, or engage in cruelty or sexual immorality or dark sickness to bury it? And when they do that it is their own selves they prey upon. In addition to others.

We are living in a world we are destroying. We bunch up together in city cockroach towers like some sort of lab rat experiment and damage each other and prey on each other's weakness. Lies and liars are like the sand of the shore, beyond number.

Love your neighbor as you do yourself. How alien that is, to this world.

When people send me mail trying to get me to buy some come-on bullshit I neither need nor want, they want to make me the food and themselves the eater. It may be money not flesh they want, but the principle is the same. Is it not my flesh and blood if I worked for it? Expended some of my few years of life to earn it? It is my blood they want, in fact. Economic vampires.

It's not just humans, we are the mutant offspring of the natural world, and nature is extremely vicious. In a sense, we just did nature better than any of the other monsters on this planet, we progressed without balance, and so now we can dominate all life. Congratulations, Homo Sapiens, you won the three billion year long asshole contest on the planet Earth. You get the prize.

I want to set this stage of despair for you, because if you don't understand this part fully, you are in danger of practicing pollyannaism, not faith. Blind unreasoning optimism, not faith. I see this all too often.

Faith can only become what it truly is when you  UNDERSTAND  the darkness. Faith does not live where you are standing on the deck of the Titanic and believe yourself to be standing in a sunny green meadow. Faith only lives where you see the icy water coming up, claiming the lives of the poor struggling souls slipping into the sea. Faith is only faith in the face of darkness.

Do not succumb to the darkness, but know it.

What does this darkness have to do with faith? We often think of faith as being synonymous with belief, but it's not. Faith at core is an action, not a thought, not a belief. Thoughts and actions may go into it, may prepare the ground for it, but where the rubber actually meets the road is in courageous action in the face of darkness, in the face of limitation, in the face of despair or even death.

In this sense Yoda was right. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Or in this case: Do, or do not. There is no belief.

If I were to try to proceed logically in the face of this overwhelming darkness, how could I even proceed to do that? Like Luke trying to lift the X-wing from the swamp mud: there is no way from here to there. Logically what I should do is try to score a whole lot of heroin so I can try to erase myself chemically from this existence.

Or like Peter stepping out of the boat onto the sea: you do know you will fall straight through that shit, right? You can't walk on water. He could try all day long, he is never going to believe that he can walk on liquid water. That's crazy.

What he can do is say, "that IS water, it IS liquid, and I am going to step on it anyway."

What I find is this: the only way I can extricate myself from the blackness is not to think or believe that G-d will deliver me from it. The only way I can extricate myself from it is to act faith. I throw myself out there and pray that G-d will catch me as I fall.

I do, not believe. You cannot truly believe your way to faith. You can only act your way to faith. I don't mean act like in a play. I mean, He tells you to step out on the water, you step. You may wind up neck deep, or you may be dancing on the wavelets, but you step regardless. And you can never think your way into that step. You cannot believe your way into it. Because if you trust the evidence of your eyes and mind, there is nothing out there but the cold depths.

It is a matter of pure raw trust in Him expressed in action, and nothing else.

And there has never been a time in my memory when I did this (and was following His will) and He was not faithful. He is always faithful, I am the one who has the problem.

I woke up this morning pretty miserable and a bit pissed off that I cannot regulate my sleep very well. I woke up at 11 after a restless night and I have a lot to do just in general these days, so after coffee that's half the day gone. And I have been feeling kind of grungy lately. Nothing specific, just overall bleh.

But I was like, "whatever, lets just go. I can't control how I sleep, apparently, but I am going to give the rest of the day my best shot." And you know, before long I was feeling pretty good and even blessed. I could have turned around and gone back to bed, in which case I would have missed the blessing.

Don't wait to feel good before you act. Do not wait to defeat despair before you act. Act, as long as you are acting according to G-d's will, and you will draw the strength you need in acting. Faith is not what you believe, it is what you do.