Life and Souls

Can you hope for eternal LIFE without believing in eternal SOULS? Read on.

Much of the Christian teaching about eternal life and about souls is not present in the Tanakh (which Christians call the Old Testament.) There is some vague talk about Sheol (which is not represented as hell but pretty much an all-inclusive gloomy receptacle for the deceased,) and about people being "gathered to their fathers." This latter may be somewhat literal: we are going to put your bodies where the bodies of your ancestors were put before you. "Soul" is a Greek conception and as such would have been totally alien to the ancient Hebrews.

If you want a good idea of what the ancient Jews thought about death, look at Psalm 90, which is supposedly the only Psalm that was written by Moses himself.

Psalm 90
A prayer of Moses the man of God.

Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.

Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

You turn people back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”

A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.

Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death— they are like the new grass of the morning:

In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.

You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.

All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.

Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty, if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

If only we knew the power of your anger!
Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.

Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble.

May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children.

May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us;
establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands.


I find this very credible as an actual writing of Moses, not just because it says so. Anyway, the Psalm talks about death and this world, starting with people getting withered to dust and blown away, and ending with work (in this world.) There is no other world shown in this Psalm: death is a terrible and unavoidable fate. Destruction, because of G-d's wrath.

And yet... and yet... G-d speaks of the beloved dead as if they were still there. He says, for the sake of your father Abraham I bring you out of Egypt. For the sake of David. For the sake of my love for Abraham and my covenant with him. Elisha brings a man back from the dead EVEN THOUGH HE HIMSELF IS DEAD. It doesn't say G-d raised that man. It says ELISHA raised him. The power of his dead bones.

LIFE belongs to G-d. G-d IS LIFE. The power of life IS His and always WAS. He breathed life into every living thing. He gives life to those He wishes.

It is totally under G-d's sovereign will whether anyone will have an afterlife or whether no one will. Eternity is not a birthright. G-d gave you life.

It's up to Him whether He gives it again.

The Tanakh does not speak of an afterlife in clear terms because that is something that is subject to G-d's sovereign will alone. He may will to raise from the dead. He may not. That we will all die and be destroyed is a certainty. Whether we have a future after that, is totally up to G-d. So talk of an afterlife is kind of presumptive of G-d's sovereign will. You have a spirit but not an eternal soul. Bad people don't squirm forever in hell, they are just destroyed, obliterated, boom. The gift G-d gave, Life, He takes back. That solves that problem, and nobody is squirming in hell. Just gone. Hasta la vista, baby.

"Soul" is a Greek idea. Not a Jewish one.

Nevertheless, some parts of the Tanakh are suggestive of a brighter future for the righteous, particularly in Isaiah. I can't quote chapter and verse on it, but somewhere in Isaiah it says that the righteous will receive their reward even if their life on this Earth sucks completely. And of course there are the Branch from Jesse verses which describe a life quite unlike this one:


The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Isaiah 11:6-9

Man, that last part is good. The Earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as water covers the sea.

Religious Jews believe in the Kingdom of the Righteous, which is a future Kingdom of God not completely unlike life on Earth. However, it may well be that the Kingdom of the Righteous is a humanly inconceivable form of existence, beyond our comprehension, and so Isaiah uses parallels. All animals at peace. No war. The knowledge of G-d filling everything.



They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

History of Monotheism Up Until Now

 

G-D YHWH ALMIGHTY:

"And now, O Israel, give heed to the laws and rules that I am instructing you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you.

You shall not add anything to what I command you (in the Torah)

or take anything away from it,

but keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you."

~Deuteronomy 4:1-2



THE JEWS:

"But Lord, we have these awesome rabbis, Lord, who we really like so much and whose words we really like so much and which help to explain so much, so we want to print about 12 volumes of what they said and put it right up on the shelf next to what You say, oh Lord, so we can have both the cool stuff You said and the cool stuff THEY said and obey both! Because these very wise men surely would not -overcomplicate/obfuscate/ritualize/completely misunderstand- what You said because they are so wise!

And we certainly can't be bothered to figure out all this stuff on our own. We'd rather someone tell us. You know, a professional religious expert. It's complicated, You certainly can't want us to entrust Your word to amateurs? I mean,when you do that you get..."


THE CHRISTIANS:

"Yo, you are forgetting about God's son Jesus. Who told us to ignore some of the things you Jews said and indeed some of the things Moses said as commanded by God, because he is God's son and he can do that."


THE JEWS:

"Whut???"


THE CHRISTIANS:

"Ya, God has a son, named Jesus, and he commanded us to ignore your 12 volume book and in fact to ignore the Torah EVEN THOUGH IT IS STILL SCRIPTURE AT THE SAME TIME. It is still scripture AND we can still ignore it. Jesus be cool like that."



THE JEWS:

(After some of their brains collapse from the sheer stupidity, the survivors respond:)

"I am going to say this very slowly so that you can understand. One, God said that the Torah is His word and you should absolutely obey it...."


THE CHRISTIANS:

"You mean like you do, without ADDING ANYTHING TO IT, eh....?"


THE JEWS:

"Shaddap, I am not finished. Secondly, God said that He should not be represented as any created being, which a human being like Jesus is definitely a created being. Thirdly He said He is ONE GOD, He had no partners, no helpers, HE ALONE IS GOD AND THERE ARE NO OTHER GODS. No Trinity. No deified humans. JUST GOD ALONE. No other gods. Any other gods, and you get polytheism, so you Christians are functionally polytheists."


THE CHRISTIANS:

"JEEEE-SUS IS MOAR AWESOME we get wine and biscuits and CHRISTMAS and Easter eggs HUK HUK HUK EAT IT JEWS."


THE JEWS:

*sigh* "How long, O Lord?"




THE MUSLIMS:

"Your holy books, the Tanakh AND the New Testament, ARE BOTH holy books AND we get to ignore them and tell people NOT to read them but read our totally plagiarized version instead. Written by ignorant savages, it's more better.

Also, you get to walk in circles around giant cubes and kiss rocks AND THAT IS NOT PAGANISM IN ANY WAY even though pagans used to do that very same thing with the very same or similar cube and rock. IT LOOKS LIKE PAGANISM BUT ITS NOT BECAUSE WE SAY SO.

Also also, we get to stick the cube in the middle of nowhere, which is nowhere near a trade route or fields or streams and then call that Mecca* even though the original Mecca is described in the Quran as being a hub of a major trade route and having fields and streams and city walls and being a major site of pagan pilgrimage to boot.

You know, exactly like PETRA was, but we are going to say it was not Petra (although we used to pray directly at Petra and not Mecca* as is proven by the direction of our qiblas in this time period) and instead this place in the middle of absolute god-forsaken nowhere with no archeological evidence of any sign of civilization whatsoever above the goat-sexing level is what we are now calling Mecca*. Where we have put the cube. That people walk circles around. With the black stone which is definitely not pagan even though Arabians used to worship stones. And you will believe this.

Also also also, our prophet had sex with a NINE YEAR OLD and that is totally okay. And if you say it is not WE KEEEEEEELL U.

Also, we admit the archangel Gabriel or devils or jinn or something told Muhammad crazy shit to test him, but we also know the difference between the crazy shit and the non-crazy shit Muhammad said.

Also, Jinn are a thing. Sentient life forms that you cannot see unless you are crazy or Muhammad. We cannot prove Jinn exist, but the Quran mentions them so there. They are in fact in every way the equal of human beings, having free will, presumably full lives of their own, but you can't see them. But they're there. But you can't see them.

Also, we kill, tax, make peace treaties with or treat leniently disbelievers depending on what passage you quote. Allah knew we needed flexibility. But if we kill the infidels, we are totally covered from a Quranic point of view. As we are if we do actually ANYTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER to them. Cover them in bacon. Okay. Feed them to Jinn, assuming Jinn eat people. Okay. Rain whipped cream on their heads. Okay. Invite them to weddings. Okay, okay, okay, it's all permitted.

Also, shooting stars are Allah's javelins to shoot devils with. Not at all random space rocks. Unless Allah chooses to call random space rocks 'javelins.' In which case it is permitted.

Also he is not called YHWH anymore... I mean He never was... I mean His name is Allah now. I mean always was. Even though the Torah is also scripture. And the Torah says YHWH. But you shouldn't read it. You didn't read it, did you? I mean, that's wrong. But it's still God's word. But don't read it."


THE JEWS:

"My God, my God, why have You forsaken me and my poor brain, to make me put up with this nutso crap?"


THE CHRISTIANS:

Hey, you deviated from the instructions first, yo. Don't blame us if we continue to create more deviations from instructions. After all, you were our example. 

Civilization

 I am living in the most technologically and scientifically advanced, most militarily powerful, most affluent and culturally influential, civilization that the world has ever known. In terms of the markers that anthropologists consider when talking about the biggest, most influential, most complex civilizations, we are surely at the top.

We are also one of the great anti-civilizations of all time. I would say that the Romans at their most decadent, were probably not as bad as us. What do I mean by calling the United States an anti-civilization?

Well, most analysts of civilizations ancient and modern consider a civilization's material aspects to be most important. Not unlike the Communist Man, the Anthropological Civilized Man eats and drinks and sleeps and has shelter and can read and write more or less well, and how well a society does these things is 8/10ths of the signs of their being an advanced society. Traditionally a society's development of art, music, literature and such things were also considered a sign, but lets be honest: the most sublime music in the world might be made on some mountain slope in the Caucasus or the slopes of the Himalayas; but if the musicians drink from mud puddles they are not going to be considered members of an advanced society.

The relativity of art is now assumed, so if one person prefers Mozart and the other prefers Beavis and Butthead or just plain porn, that's just like your opinion man. Our society takes a strangely Soviet attitude towards art: quantity has a quality of its own. This statement was originally made of tanks and airplanes; that the Soviets didn't have tanks and airplanes that were AS GOOD, but they sure had a heck of a lot of them. Interestingly, while we take a rather Soviet production attitude towards art (production is production, quality is subjective,) no lavishing of money on tanks and airplanes is too much. There we definitely know art, not just what we like.

And I am not saying we don't have arts and letters and music and dance. We have more of it than anyone else. Almost all of that is devoid of certain values, but we will get to that in a moment. While I referred to our attitudes towards art as "Soviet," I meant in terms of valuing production for its own sake. Sausages are sausages are sausages, the more standardized the better. Only 7% sawdust! Soviet art itself was very much a matter of whether it glorified the revolution or not. So they were not so much interested in production in that case. If you glorified Communism you were accepted: if not watch out. That's one reason why actual Soviet art and culture was widely considered to be dog crap.

So, what we are left with as the measure of a civilization is how well the people eat and sleep and dress, whether we have basic writing and math skills and shelter and running water. In other words, completely materialistic criteria. And in all those, we are doing great. For those who measure a civilization by its arts and letters, well, take your pick. We have more creative works than anyone. We don't believe in any objective standards to any of it, but take what you like.

The human is a consumer of food and clothing and math and writing and shelter and running water and art and science and technology. Satisfy that well, and bingo, you are an advanced civilization. And you know, we all need such things or at least the basics. I may not need a new IPhone but I need clean drinking water and a roof over my head.

You may notice that what is missing from this picture are any humane values. Man in this picture is not a creature capable of nobility, a little lower than the angels: he is an output for which inputs must be devised. Preferably at the greatest possible profit. He is a sink for physical goods, he takes in food and water and shelter and clothing and art and technology and he spits out money. Devise the inputs, and Man produces the output, which is cash to build the coffers of the rich. The masses get stuff, the rich get richer, the system works.

The idea that that Man would develop personally or socially, beyond the needs of the system, is a non-sequitur. Learn how to be a better worker? Fine, great, that is admirable. Learn to be a better person? Does not compute.

And what is the foundry of all these humane values which society has no material use for? The family. What is the foundation of ALL? The foundation of turning a mere homo sapiens into a true human being made in the image of G-d? The foundation of LIFE ITSELF? The Lord G-d. 

So you see why this "civilization" must attack both the family and G-d. They are bugs in its machine.

It attacks the family by glorifying all sorts of *alternate sexual arrangements.* It does not merely permit these, no: it glorifies them. Queer is not an option, it is practically mandatory at this point. Sex is a commodity, romantic relationships are a commodity, and you are a consumer of it.

No other arrangement fits into the World-Machine.

It must attack G-d as being a competing authority. The Global Market must be the only authority.

The market meaning: not the free market, such a thing scarcely exists anymore. Rather it is the Global Market which they utterly dominate.

You are a consumer, you consume, period

You will work for us, you will buy from us, FULFILL YOUR FUNCTION, CONSUMER.

If you say otherwise, you are an extremist and a freak. This is the ultimate tyranny of our anti-civilization.

***

I have been reading a lot of Sayyid Qutb lately, and on one topic I absolutely disagree with him on. It is not possible to confront the World-Machine by force. If it is a battle of physical strength, the World-Machine, Jahilayyah (ignorance) as he called it, has already won. Of course, the reason he wound up swinging from a gallows instead of retiring to some nice university chair somewhere is that he did advocate jihad. Against, essentially, the whole world, though I guess not all at the same time.

Setting his suicidal quest for Jihad in Nasser's Egypt aside (Gamal Abdel Nasser not being a fan of such things, hence his execution,) he is spot-on on a whole lot of other things. He spoke a lot about civilization, meaning for him Islamic civilization, but whether you are Muslim or belonging to some other Abrahimic religion like me, his points on the needs of a G-d centered society are on target. The social foundation of such a society is the family, and the foundation of that is the mother. To be a mother is the single most important job on the planet, despite its reputation and poor perks: only mothers can center families and teach the next generation humane values. So the push to have women work jobs corrodes the very foundations of a G-d centered society. Which is probably kind of the point. To have women as well as men live self-centered materialistic lives as consumers. The kind of lives the World-System wants.

And far be it from me to tell any woman that she should abandon the career and stay at home to build her family. I don't want to have to tell anyone anything. Problem is, it's not me saying it. It's G-d saying it. I will grant you that we have work to do to ensure mothers a fair shake in this world: every husband should have to pay in X hundred dollars a week to a fund that is only released at the time of his death. So the death of a breadwinner need not destroy a family. There are many other such things that should be done to make sure that mothers are not treated as subjects and lackeys but as people doing the most important job on Earth. However, there is no doubt that in a G-d centered society, they or at least most of them need to be doing it. A humane society cannot survive without it.

And don't tell me that this IS a humane society. 60 MILLION pre-born children dead, and you want to tell me that? A leftist monopoly on media and presently on government trying to subvert every foundation of decent life, and you want to tell me that? Destroyed human beings littering the streets of California, and you want to tell me that this is a humane society?

THIS IS NOT A HUMANE SOCIETY. IT NEVER CAN BE ONE WITHOUT G-D AND HIS LAW.

Qutb, despite his rather delusional belief in jihad, was quite eloquent on the topic of what builds a G-d centered society. Part of that as he said is surely relief for the poor, but relief for the poor cannot be disconnected from efforts to lift them from their despair, and in this society lift them from drug and alcohol abuse and deranged life philosophies and many such other things. In other words relief for the poor must be a whole system of repairing the life, not just filling the bellies. This again is impossible without G-d.

A G-d centered society must not devolve into Stateolatry, such as we have so much of today. Socialism places the State in the center of all things: the State is god, to a socialist. Now, a classical limited-government scenario as is prescribed by many conservatives is not a solution either, it is just a limitation of the problem. If we continue with associating liberty with license, a limited government will only devolve to the socialist kind of government we are looking at today. It is not a coincidence that the once-freest nation on Earth is now devolving into a socialist one. Liberty without G-d is merely slavery to the passions and the Self.

So yes, we are living in the most technologically advanced civilization the world has ever known, and in what is in some ways one of the most spiritually backward civilizations the world has ever known. May the Lord free souls from this trap.

--------------------------------------

EDIT:
I said we are devolving into a socialist society: in fact no political labels from the 19th or 20th Centuries apply accurately. It is a new creature. What we are looking at is a massive centralization of economic control in the hands of a few dozens of massively powerful corporations, and meanwhile the centralization of State control. The State, which is functionally controlled by these massively powerful corporations. While such a society might have some superficial similarity to, say, the conditions in Germany under the Nazis where the economically powerful colluded with the politically powerful, in fact no society like this one has ever existed. Also in Nazi Germany, the politicians were clearly on top of this hierarchy: they fundamentally had control and the economically powerful just helped them and were helped by them.

The situation in America today is quite radically different from any kind of socialism that has existed before. Essentially it is a socialism that is an avenue for control by the massively powerful corporations who set a social and political agenda according to their needs.

What are those needs?

1.) They are tired of people taking family time. You belong to your corporation: if you get pregnant you need to get that little cancer on their profits removed. As Bloomberg once said, get that taken care of.

2.) Gay people don't generally procreate. So minimal family time is needed.

3.) They are tired of paying for your medical care. Nationalize that shit, so taxes can pay for it instead of them.

4.) Please get divided, America. The more you hate each other, the less of a threat you present. This has worked marvelously so far.

5.) You want to take Sundays off? You want to take Saturday (which is the actual Sabbath) off? You may want to have, like, moral principles? That may come in conflict with what we want from you?

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

We the corporations are your gods. So obviously religion is right out of the question.

The Sword

(I realize this post kind of rambles: consider it a meditation out loud.)

The "middle acts" of both Judaism and Islam are stories of conquest. In Judaism, aside from Genesis which can be seen as a kind of preface, there is the story of how Moses got a message from G-d, led his people to freedom, and taught them G-d's ways. That's the first act. Second act is conquest: the Conquest of Canaan. Third act is arguably, how the Israelites fell away from G-d after the conquest of Canaan.

Where the Conquest of Canaan differs from the Muslim Conquests is, the Conquest of Canaan is a limited mandate. Basically, G-d has a very proprietary feeling about the Land of Canaan: it is HIS land. Now the whole Earth is His land, but the rest of that land has been given to other people who ignorantly worship the stars and planets and animals and such. The people in Canaan now are very very wicked and His own people, the Israelites, don't have land at all. So the Lord is going to evict the Canaanites from Canaan.

Rather violently. Your lease is up. Your hair has clogged all the sinks, all your toilets are backed up, your dogs have shit all over the carpets. GTFO.

This is however a very limited mandate for the Israelites. All along the path to Canaan G-d tells them, "this particular land does not belong to you, that particular land does not belong to you. Just Canaan. Don't conquer these other places. In Canaan though, it is definitely time to kick ass or chew bubble gum, and they are completely out of gum. So that is the conquest phase of Judaism.

In Islam, the angel talks to Muhammad and he starts writing down the Quran, which is somewhat of a lengthy process. The angel does not sit down and dictate it all at once, and it is not relatively straightforward like the Ten Commandments. Which, mark up a point on the scoreboard for the clarity and simplicity of the Ten Commandments. Anyway while Muhammad takes dictation and starts gathering a following, a great many people start getting pissed off at him. Much of his earliest teaching has to do with the core of Islam, which is expressed in the saying "lā ilāha illā allāh" which is that there is no god worthy of worship other than G-d. Well, absolute monotheism is bad for business in a place that derives much of its wealth from pagan pilgrimages.

As an aside, there is every reason to believe that today's Mecca was not that place. What is today Mecca was in that time period not even an insignificant bump in the road. It was not on a trade route. It was not a famous place of pilgrimage. It was nothing. It's not even properly inhabitable, except maybe for a few sheep. That place, which was a lynchpin of regional trade and a place known for a huge variety of pagan shrines and pilgrimage sites besides, was Petra. Petra was very likely the real Mecca.

Anyway, people got mighty pissed at ol Muhammad and he vacated the premises to Medina, which lacking an economic stake in polytheism converted to Islam. And then, his initial fight was just for survival. Lots of people in Mecca wanted to see him pushing daisies. So the battles and temporary truces with the Quraish continued until ultimately Muhammad conquered Mecca. Which was probably actually Petra, but I digress.

Aaaaand... he just sort of kept going. And the Caliphs after him kept going. Until the Muslim Empire was one of the largest the Earth had ever known. And then it kind of fell apart, for reasons I am not an expert on, but one reason surely is power struggles among the Muslim leadership as to who should be Caliph. The split between Sunni and Shiite dates to one of those succession issues. Another reason is the ascendancy of Europe. Any way you look at it though, "God's Conquest of the Earth" from the Muslim perspective ground to a bloody halt. And then began centuries of retreat.

Christianity, an exception to the Abrahimic rule, did not start out kicking asses. It was a religion of underdogs, and remained a religion of underdogs for a couple hundred years thereafter. During that couple hundred years it assimilated a lot of paganism, unfortunately. However Christianity had going for it the idea that the meek, not the strong, would inherit the Earth. Despite present evidence to the contrary.

The point I am making here is that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity sort of inherited from Judaism, are religions born or at least molded in conquest. To an extent in Judaism (their territorial ambitions being more precise) and definitely in Islam, the Kingdom of G-d would enter the world by the sword.

This has not happened.

As far as Judaism is concerned, I take no issue with their conquest but it is limited as a model of the Kingdom's expansion beyond Israel. In Judaism's case it was always intended to be limited. Judaism never had a mandate to conquer the world by force. G-d's kingdom would be established in Israel and the "nations" would continue to be independent and presumably pagan, a thought that would be abhorrent to many of their Muslim kin. Over time, one would hope that Israel's example would spread and enlighten the world, but we never get to that part of the plan and Israel soon proved itself to be not much better at being G-d's agents on Earth than anyone else. That part of the plan, if it existed, fell through because the kingdoms of Israel and Judah became wicked, just exactly like everyone else.

There's a moral to this story: power attracts corrupt people, and it doesn't matter whether that power is secular or religious or anything else. Corrupt, scheming, shrewd and ambitious people seek and gain positions of power, to the exclusion of anyone less so. So in a sense the Christians are right: if the Kingdom of G-d is going to enter the Earth, it won't be through the powerful. The meek may have not inherited the Earth thus far, but if the Earth is to be inherited by a holy people, only the meek can qualify because human power corrupts.

In any case, the horizon of opportunity for bringing forth the Kingdom at the point of a sword has now likely expired. The world has a new religion: secularism. And it cannot be defeated at the point of a sword. The whole conquest-for-God thing, aside from its limited and necessary application in the Conquest of Canaan, was never really such a great idea. Now, the Conquest of Canaan had to happen or we would not have the Tanakh (for Christians the Old Testament) today. Other than that, it had limited application in the ancient world and no application in the modern.

Even many people worldwide who consider themselves Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish, are usually functionally secularists. To determine that, do not look at what they say they believe. Look at how they live. If they are living just like secularists, they are secularists. If they watch the same TV, go to the same movies, drink the same beer, surf the same porn, work on the same Sabbath day, and vote for the same policies as secularists, they are secularists no matter what they say.

Secularism is the new religion, and it needs no point of a sword to spread, though it can certainly use it. It spreads by appealing to people's most base impulses. It is both a civilization and an anti-civilization: anti-civilization in the sense of being against any truly noble aspiration of the human spirit. Against the uplift of the human spirit. People are consumers, they consume, that is what characterizes them. Obviously decadent and self-indulgent people consume more, which is better from the point of view of the masters. They are workers, to pay their human masters for the consuming. Their human masters grow more and more wealthy and powerful. Working and consuming are the two sides of the secular man: they are enslaved to consumption and they are willingly enslaved. Qutb called it Jahiliyyah, the great world-ignorance, which originally referred to pre-Islamic paganism but which he used to refer to the new paganism, Westernism and secularism.

And we should not assume that they are merely indoctrinated into secularism, though of course they are also indoctrinated. The vast mass of humanity genuinely want to live as selfish consumers and cannot now understand anything else. Harkening back to Sayyid Qutb, who has been much on my mind the last few days, he seemed to believe that the wool had been pulled over the eyes of the masses. That they had somehow been deluded against their will. No, they choose secularism because they want to. They may want to also call themselves Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, but if that interferes with their secularism, watch out! If they really have to choose between G-d and money, or the esteem of their peers, or going to see the latest blockbuster movie everyone is talking about, then you will see where their hearts are.

And so, G-d's conquest of the Earth by the sword, having somewhat achieved its limited objective in Judaism and having essentially failed in Islam and being renounced by Christianity, leaves us without much of an alternate plan. You cannot defeat secularism with a sword. You cannot defeat it with words, or preaching, or acts of self-sacrifice, or it would have been defeated already. You cannot defeat it at all. Which is rather a shame because it sucks: for us and for the whole planet really.

So what is our game plan in the face of the apparent victory of secularism over all? Wait for G-d's action? No doubt He will act, and it may be rather extremely unpleasant when He does. Communicate our views? Preach? Secularism dominates the means of communication: it may permit people like me to talk about G-d in some obscure corner of the internet, far off the main highways, but it controls the narrative overall. The sword? As jihadists the world over have no doubt learned to their grief, that also does not work well. The West may cede Afghanistan to the Taliban, a remote and unimportant country, but it would never back down in any area that really mattered to it. Trying to institute the Kingdom of G-d by the sword these days is an awfully expeditious way to die pointlessly.

Acts of unselfish self-sacrifice? Ask Paul Hill. The State put him to death for (violently) trying to stop abortionists from murdering babies, and nobody cares and few have even heard of him. Sure, he shot abortionists, so that comes under the category of the sword, but then he didn't try to defend himself legally and willingly accepted the death penalty for trying to save innocent human lives and that was the self-sacrifice part. A noble but wasted gesture, in this society. Nobody cared.

Every time we try to play by any of these rules (except the first,) we lose. In the case of the first instance, waiting for G-d to act, when He does it might be really really bad and possibly final. I don't have answers, just the question.

There is no god but G-d. Lā ilāha illā allāh. Hear O Israel: the Lord your G-d, the Lord is One.

Journal Entry: My Jackrabbit's Strength

 I have a journal, but I don't use it to record the mundane facts of my life. I only use it to record religious thoughts. The earliest date in it is November 2018, but there are several pages before that of undated reflections so I assume I started in early 2018 or possibly before. This is part of one entry from that time.

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"I am weak and not strong, but when I look at the world I am strong for one thing: to be separate from it. To run from it. My strength is a jackrabbit's strength, to run.

To run from the world and it's darkness, this is my only strength.

Lord, I do hate the dark. I hate it with all my strength, my jackrabbit strength. I love truth, though it is sometimes hard to see. I love You. These are my only virtues. My strength is not that I am strong, but that I am afraid. I fear and hate the dark. Ignorance, greed, lies, violence, godlessness. I do hate these with all my heart. I can only come before you empty-handed, Lord, not as one with something to give, but as a beggar. And I do beg: save me from the dark.

I come before You as a refugee.

1 Samuel 2:9 - "for not by strength will man prevail."

I am a sparrow, who sings in Your shadow.

Free Will

 

 "If you bring out what is within you,
what is within you will save you.

If you do not bring out what is within you,
what is within you will destroy you."

 ~Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas

 
I know that this world is a foundry of free will. It was never paradise and never can be paradise, paradise is somewhere else. I know that it is our Father's will that everyone bring out what is within them, for good and evil. To bring forth either the Child of G-d, or the child of godlessness. Of course He wants us to choose good, for our sakes, but we are free not to.

 I have been writing the Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb, a great writer and I highly recommend him. He gets a bad rap for being "the ideological father of Osama bin Laden" and "the ideological father of Anwar al-Awlaki." As far as I can tell, he never killed anyone or recommended doing so, except for tyrants which a lot of people recommend the deaths of tyrants. However he and the Islamists generally are operating under a delusion. The delusion is that G-d's law can come into fruition on Earth on a mass scale. At a minimum, that the tyranny of the human will can be overthrown on a mass scale. It cannot, and was never intended to be. The Iranians tried it, and developed their own unique form of theocratic tyranny, but tyranny nevertheless. On this Earth, power abhors a vacuum and Nature always fills that vacuum with the most ruthless and ambitious.

It is our Father's will that we choose Him of our own free will. That we choose Him despite obstacles. That we choose Him, in a materialistic, shallow and godless world, despite many discouragements. That we overcome great travails to choose Him. There is a price. He is willing - He does not wish that any be lost but He is willing - that a hundred million humans live out self-centered godless materialistic lives and die, in order to bring into birth one child of G-d.

The birth of a child of G-d is very, very expensive.

A whole world must live and die to bring it into existence.

 Those hundred million get their choice. They have free will. Every single one of those numberless million, get the choice. For the overwhelming majority of them, the world of the senses, of pleasure, of gain, of earthly joys, earthly objectives, is what they want. The world of created things. They live, they die, that's it. Which is what they themselves largely expect. Outside of possibly severe adverse consequences in this world, there is no judgment, there is no hell. They were given a gift, Life; they used it as they wished; that's it.

If they never spent a moment giving glory to their Creator and the Creator of all, that is their choice. G-d does not hate them. But He can be excused if He finds no particular reason to give them anything else. It is His choice, to give or not.

The Child of G-d must not seek power in any form for himself. That's just the thing, the thing that the Islamists get so wrong, to their peril and that of everyone else. You cannot seek power to "set the world aright" if the problem is human power to begin with. Your human power would be no different from theirs. With the best of intentions, you would set the whole thing in motion again, with a new despotism to replace the old despotism. G-d's kingdom can only be the leadership of G-d, not you or I. G-d's kingdom is from within, from inward devotion and submission.

But while I embrace this truth, I am also very uncomfortable with it. I protest, all the time, whatever the new atrocity is from the Woke Left. I would love for human power in the form of Republican leadership to set it aright. BUT IT WILL NEVER EVER BE SET ARIGHT. Only you can set yourself aright.

I am angry, incensed, furious. All the time. I am furious at the murder of 60 million children thus far in the abortion holocaust. I would like to take those abortion doctors and grind their faces into concrete and pound their heads to mush. I would like them to feel what being aborted feels like first-hand. I am incensed, furious at the corruption of our society's youth. I am incensed, angry at the glorification of sin that our society commits on a daily basis, every day some new outrage.

I AM ANGRY.

But this world is doing exactly what G-d designed it to do. If you bring out what is within you, what is within you will save you (the Kingdom of G-d.) If you do not bring out what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. The vacuum of the absence of the Kingdom of G-d in your heart, which you must fill with drugs or sex or deviance and immorality of one kind or another. And then ultimately death, forever. Ashes under the feet of the Children.

You have to go back to that very first day you committed rebellion against G-d, as a young child, and renounce that. Repent and disown it. Ask forgiveness for the very first time you turned your heart against G-d. THAT is when you turned your back on the Kingdom of G-d. That was when the light of the Kingdom of G-d started to dim in your heart. And if you cannot cry over THAT day, how can you be saved? I remember that day, for myself, or the day when it really came to a head anyway. I was just a child. But I decided, with the free will that G-d gave me.

Anyway, back to the anger. There are 332 million Americans, and if 331 million of them choose godlessness,

THERE · IS · NOTHING · I · CAN · DO.

 If I had some amazingly successful career at assassinating leftists, or blowing up abortion clinics, or detonating casinos and racetracks - which is very very unlikely - NOTHING WOULD CHANGE.

If I blew up every abortion clinic in America, through a completely unprecedented string of successful terrorism, NOTHING WOULD CHANGE. Because over half of America wants them to exist. So they will. I do not even believe that G-d would bless my efforts with success, because HE wants them to choose. Choose to murder their own children, if that's what they want. They are choosing.

America itself exists in some sense to serve godlessness. Liberty. In truth there is no liberty without G-d, but the kind of liberty America provides is essentially license. You want to get drunk every night, you do it. Smoke pot every day, do it. That is why pot is becoming legal everywhere here, prohibiting pot is fundamentally un-American. Just like Prohibition, which was started for the most saintly of motives, avoiding ruined lives, but American wasn't having it. They wanted liberty. The liberty to get drunk. The liberty to BE drunks, if they wish. Sleep around if you like. Sleep with the same sex if you like. Gambling, gambling has been normalized in some form in every state of the Union I believe. Even Texas has its lottery, and casinos and horse racing are as close as Oklahoma or Louisiana. I get ads for Oklahoma casinos all the time, living on the northern edge of Texas. Granted, thankfully, Texas is not as bad as some. Homosexuality, trans, all as normal and American as apple pie now.

No human power of mine, or indeed a million of me, would change anything. They have chosen. They were given that choice to make. That's why we are all here on Earth. Stopping it would be an usurpation of power that is not mine to take. G-d will eventually destroy them, not me.

So while these things do violence to my soul, and I think should, my anger is a temptation to change things with human power. Believe me, even if the Republicans take control of government for a hundred years, even if CNN Center meets the wrecking ball (please G-d,) even if the Leftists are in retreat everywhere, FUNDAMENTALLY NOTHING WILL CHANGE. Because in those 331 million hearts, the desire to sin will continue. Because that is what they choose. And they can choose it.

 And I don't think that 331 million out of 332 million number is far wrong. While I do not regard the New Testament as scripture, I think Jesus was probably right about the narrow road. 

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

~Matthew 7:13-14

I have to learn to abandon my anger. It accomplishes nothing. This society is teaching sin and abomination, YES. YES it is, absolutely. This society has murdered SIXTY MILLION CHILDREN AND COUNTING. YES, yes it has. This society has normalized sin and abomination YES. YES it absolutely has. This nation is the whore of Babylon if ever there was one. America on this Fourth of July is not a light to the world it is a CESSPOOL OF EVIL. YES, yes it is. All this is true.

And  · THERE · IS · NOTHING · I · CAN · DO · about that at all. I cannot stop it. I cannot correct it in the slightest. If I pour gasoline on myself and set myself alight on the steps of the Supreme Court, I only become grist for today's headlines, "he was a disturbed soul clearly," and tomorrow it is on with the festival of darkness. And the next day. And the next. Until finally America is brought down.

And on that day, were I alive to see it, all I could do is celebrate that the great satan is over. Until it begins again. Because there will likely always be a great satan, to take its place. Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Sassanids, Ottomans, Britain, America, China, and on it goes. Until the end.

G-d is King, not me. I have to embrace that truth and withdraw my personal emotional investment in where this sad world goes next. Will sin and injustice continue to offend my soul and cause me suffering? Yes, always. But that is between me and G-d, not me and the World. I am not a citizen of that world anymore.

 

How do we become REAL?

 Humans live in a world of unreality. A good example of this is money: we all need it, but what IS it actually? A unit of measure for human necessity and desire. There is no reality behind it other than you and I and everyone roughly agreeing that X is roughly worth a dollar, or however many dollars, in value. Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, essentially let the cat out of the bag in 2009 I think it was, when he said that the Fed just changes numbers in their accounts with banks whenever it is deemed desirable. Inventing money out of thin air. Nor does our taxes have any real relationship with spending. When necessary, they just add zeroes.

This is by no means the most relevant or pernicious example. When a prairie is bulldozed to make a strip mall, a real thing - a prairie full of life and living creatures - is destroyed to make room for a fake thing - a human economic construct. We are continually in the process of destroying life to make way for death, destroying reality for the sake of unreality.

And hundreds of millions of us are employed in things that are either not necessary or conducive to life or should not be. Just one egregious example: the cosmetics industry. What is the worldwide cosmetics industry worth, how many billions? How many animals are tortured for the sake of it? So that people can pretend to be what they are not. The real is sacrificed on the altar of the unreal.

How many of you get come-on advertisements in the mail which try to deceive you into buying something that you don't need? The people, and more relevantly to our topic the institutions, that send you that stuff want to trade your actuality, the truthful mind of a living being, for the unreality they value most: money.

How many people spend their lives inside office walls and cubicles, imagining they are doing something with their lives? And then they spend two hours a day in a commute, all the while imagining they are free, when they are in a cage. A cage of human constructs and structures and rules and imagined realities. A prison, for their souls.

The Torah is a relatively small set of books, and lots of stuff was left implied because it was not that relevant to the time. Had the Israelites followed everything that G-d said to them, this would be a different future, and so the Torah is focused on instruction to them, then. One of those instructions is not to create graven images or worship them. Now today we think of this as an instruction to people who were prone to pagan idolatry and isn't relevant now (as if modern people didn't practice as much idolatry!) But if you unpack this instruction a bit, it is an instruction about not substituting human constructs for reality. What is a graven image? What is an idol? It is a human construct, pretending to be a divine reality. What typifies G-d's creations? They are alive, they are living. Even the angelic beings depicted in Ezekiel with their wheels within wheels and so on, it is said that they are living creatures. Human constructs are not alive: no human can create life. If you had to pick one great brainchild of human genius as representing humanity's power of creation, you might pick the computer. And computers are capable of many sophisticated things, indeed things that humans would find difficult if not impossible to do. Crunch tremendous numbers quickly.

And all computers have one thing in common: they are all as dead as a brick. Even if in future we could create computer simulations of human minds, they would still be dead as a brick. The people, futurists, who want to escape death by becoming cyberized: they just aspire to become dead in a different way. Still way dead, but with a simulacra to keep your place occupied on the Earth.

So getting back to the title of this: how do WE become real? If we assume, which I absolutely do, that human society and human social and economic intercourse is a place of unreality (indeed this blog itself is in a sense unreal because I am not talking to YOU, I am just printing words,) okay: how do we break the spell?

The average person, indeed almost everyone outside of some primitive tribes, is absolutely dependent on the human system. That means, they do what the system tells them, or at least they do what the system rewards them for doing. The person who is still trapped in the human system but not participating is what we call a street person, and nobody wants that kind of life. And that human system absolutely reeks of unreality, of fakeness. Of the death of reality for the sake of unreality.

I would be lying to you if I told you I had a simple answer. However, the answer starts with rejecting the whole fake human machine and all its values, and substituting values that are relevant to real living beings. What are those values? Here's some of them:

Truthfulness: a lie does violence to life.
Valuing life: living beings are more important than money or human constructs when that money or construct is not necessary to your life.
Simplicity and self-restraint, because desire leads us to do violence to the world not from need but greed.