Edit 2014/08/04: A number of Christian men whose thoughts I have come to respect have made objections to this post. I have concluded that whatever my original intentions were, they do not matter at this point as, at best, the execution was flawed and deeply confused. I no longer stand behind or support what was written in this post. I’ll leave this here to read for those that may be interested, but if you decide to read it please use discernment as this post was in error. May God forgive me if this led anyone to wrong thinking. For less confused writing by on the issue at hand, see here.
Scott writes of Moloch, the demon god who traps men into sacrificing what they value most for power, and argues:
When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there is no spontaneous order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.
Instead of obeying Gnon, obeying reality, we should summon forth, Elua:
He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
…
Elua is just like “Love as thou wilt” and “All knowlege is worth having”. He is the patron deity of exactly the kind of sickeningly sweet namby-pamby charitable liberalism that Arthur is complaining about.”
Elua, the god of unreality, the god of progressive liberalism, who will usher forth the utopia of free love and endless pleasure. Kipling called Elua by another name:
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
Scott wishes to create the Gods of the Market, to uplift man with hopes for Elua will make wishes of horses. He hopes that perhaps this time we can have perpetual peace, the Fuller Life, and abundance for all, that this time, prostration before Elua, unlike all prostrations to prior Gods of the Marketplace, will not result in damnation and the return of the terror and slaughter.
This time we can escape to unreality!
What Scott misses is that we are the of Gnon. We were born, evolved, and raised under the rule of Gnon; there is no escape to Elua, for we are not born of Elua, we are born of Gnon. We can not escape Gnon, because we are Gnon and Gnon is us. The only escape is total self-annihilation. He calls Elua a god of humans, but he is not, he is a god of what progressives wish humans were. He is the most inhuman and alien of gods.
Gnon is captured in verse by Kipling, Elua is captured in doggerel by Lennon:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
This is the promised utopia of Elua: a life of peace, a life of hedonism, a terrifying hell devoid of meaning. Elua offers perpetual peace if you only value nothing, he offers eternal life if only you reject the bonds of kinship, he offers limitless pleasure if only you sacrifice your future for the hedonism of today, he offers untold joy if only you renounce meaning itself.
When the veil is lifted, Elua turns out to be Nihil, the limitless void. You can only embrace Elua by giving yourself to nothingness. You offer up not just your child, not just your body, but your very soul on the altar of hedonism. You achieve what you love most, pleasure, by sacrificing yourself, your hope, your purpose, your very being.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
If offered, would Scott attach himself to a device that injected dopamine directly into his brain, eternal bliss if only he does not move or think?
For this is what Elua offers: eternal heroin. The god of the poppy.
Even if Scott accepts Elua’s desolate hell of eternal bliss, others wouldn’t. If it meant escape from Elua, I would help Land free Cthulu. Being eaten first would be infinitely preferable to eternal self-nullifcation. I would plunge the world into holy war if Elua were to incarnate, even the most brutal savagery of Gnon is but a tender ministration compared to the blissful void.
If Nihil is, brutal savagery is the only response. If the god of civilization is also the god of the eternal nothing, I will commit human sacrifice on the altar of the gods of savagery. If the god of bliss is the god of emptiness, I will gladly embrace pain to work to his destruction. Death, war, destruction, genocide, violence, blood, savagery, fire, all are superior to the void.
I am sure I am not alone. We men were born of Gnon, it is what were evolved for, it is what we know, it is what we are. Civilization may hold back Gnon, but if embracing Gnon is the only escape from Elua, we will burn it to the ground. Man was made for struggle, man was not made for the void. Struggle may kill the body, perpetual peace devours the soul. Gnon may be a monstrous horror, but he is our monstrous horror, Elua is a greater terror far more alien.
Do not fear those who can kill only the body; fear him who can destroy the soul.
If Scott and others try to bring forth their progressive god of the blissful void, we will work to bring their dreams to ruin. We will burn civilization to the ground and salt the ruins, for savagery is preferable to the void. We will free Gnon to from his chains if only to escape; we will unleash Cthulu and be devoured first if only he will devour Elua after. We will plunge the universe into eternal war between two superintelligences if only to stop Elua from being the only one. Better a god of infinite paper-clips than Elua. We will destroy the universe itself if only to escape into death. Better the grave than eternal self-annihilation.
Gnon may be a terrible elder god from the outer void but Elua is the void itself.
A very serious question:
As a Christian, why are you adopting this cultish, pagan referral to Gnon as a being? There is one God, the triune God, and all others are demons and devils deceiving poor souls.
Don’t be a poor soul.
Chose to be a Son of God
I am a son of God.
It is a metaphor, just as the gods of the copybook heading, the gods of the marketplace, Cthulhu, Elua, Nihil, Mammon, or Hades. No thinks it exists as a person, no one prays to it, no one worships it, but as a poetic device Gnon makes paints a useful picture of the harsher aspects of the natural world.
If Christ can personify Mammon or Hades for illustrations sake, I do not see how it can be wrong to personify another natural condition of man for the same.
But sons of Gnon may have been taking the metaphor too far. I will edit that.
“When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you ‘free'”
If you complain that Gnon doesn’t make you free, you’ve missed the point. Obeying Gnon’s laws doesn’t make you free, it makes you sustainable. Gnon is a stand-in for reality – cold, hard, unromantic reality – and the idea that, while you may be able to avoid it for a little while, in the end, you will obey its rules or it *will* eat you.
It’s not a matter of freedom. It’s a matter of not ending up a pile of half-digested Gnon dung.
“Elua, the god of unreality, the god of progressive liberalism, who will usher forth the utopia of free love and endless pleasure.”
William S. Lind put it this way: Modernity is virtual reality, and in the end, actual reality always wins out over virtual reality.
“If Scott and others try to bring forth their progressive god of the blissful void, we will work to bring their dreams to ruin. We will burn civilization to the ground and salt the ruins, for savagery is preferable to the void. We will free Gnon to from his chains if only to escape; we will unleash Cthulu and be devoured first if only he will devour Elua after. We will plunge the universe into eternal war between two superintelligences if only to stop Elua from being the only one. Better a god of infinite paper-clips than Elua. We will destroy the universe itself if only to escape into death. Better the grave than eternal self-annihilation”.
* * *
“To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
It’s nice to meet another Christian with a three dimensional brain. Fruit flies can be observed to evolve. Evolution is real. Does this render the bible and God useless? Only if you have a two dimensional brain running in the opposite direction. Reality is real. I have observed personally that God is also real.
I don’t find it hard to reconcile God with Gnon at all. If you provide an incentive for a particular behavior, you will see it more often. This is a rule of Gnon. If you embrace the lusts of the flesh, your soul will rot. This is a rule of God. Gnon is shorthand for the rules God chose to apply to this reality.
The only way to escape Gnon is to seek God.
Third time’s the charm: Elua is a fucking faggot.
In Greek mythology these people were referred to as Lotus Eaters, since they spend their lives in a narcotic apathy.
Christ never personified anything into a God. He referred to Hades as a place – as hell – which can be translated either way. Translators can use Sheol, as Hades, or Hell.
In the same way, mammon is only referred to as a demon of wealth and avarice. Again, in translation it can either become a personified demon of sin, and one of the seven deadly sins at that, or it can be translated directly to serving wealth/greed instead of serving God. You might as well argue that because the Ba’als are represented as Gods in the Old Testament we should respect and follow their laws as that we should follow the laws of Gnon. That is false, we are to battle evil in all forms.
“we are born of Gnon”
You’re not writing in a metaphor. Or, if you are, it is purely a blasphemous one. You’re very literally saying that to do what is natural is right.
“we are born of Gnon. We can not escape Gnon, because we are Gnon and Gnon is us.”
No. We are flesh. We are fallen. Yet we are redeemed and saved if we abandon the flesh. If we die to the self. If we carry the cross upon which our God was crucified and ask that he crucify our own sins and sinful nature upon our own cross, which we offer to him. We are made to do so. We’re made for God, we’re made for salvation, we’re made for Heaven. We are but pilgrims in this life, called to bring glory to God while we are in the world while not being of the world.
It is not practical.
It is not natural.
It is a supernatural act of faith to place your hope in God and love Him so much that you do his Will. Not the will of Satan, Prince of this world.
Whether you call the prince of this world Gnon or Elua, they’re both demons and devils. You’re saying you’d rather unchain one demon in order to destroy another. Either way, you’re playing their game on their rules and they always win at that game. Heads Satan wins, Tails you lose your soul. You’re saying you’d rather be of a world of practical wrath, brutal justice, red in claw and in tooth than be of a world of lust and gluttony. Both are demons and devils of sin. Don’t limit yourself to choosing only between two evils.
You can’t serve two masters. Pick Gnon or God.
When confronted with adaptive effects of obeying Gnon, Scott Alexander says that it doesn’t matter since we are all going to die anyway. That’s true but its also changing the subject by massively changing the time scale. Proverbs gives the Copybook Headings. Ecclesiastes says “I’ve tried following the Proverbs and I’ve tried hedonism but if you take the long view it doesn’t matter because in the end you’re dead either way.” If you are going to take an eternal view, you’re going to need to move on to the Gospels. Scott Alexander would rather rule in hell than reign in heaven so he builds a techno-Satan.
…serve in heaven, that is…
There was significantly more wisdom in the pre-Christian world than in the post-Christian world. Pre-Christian wisdom was adaptive, the best things to maximize comfort for yourself and yours. Christ subverted that wisdom in a significant way but post-modernism (post-Christianity) is a civilizational apostacy that is much worse than paganism. I would rather people associate Christianity with the wisdom of Proverbs than suicidal, mushy-headed, post-Christian nihilism.
Humanity is ever vulnerable to the conceit of the master. Bryce is quite correct in his piece ‘You shall be as gods’… We rise to a place where we come to believe that we can create Gnon anew in our image, ever failing to recognise that our creation of Gnon is always and only ever Elua. Elua is a human edifice, an imitation, a false God.
You shall not create for yourselves a graven image.
At the point we do, we lose contact with the absolute. All becomes relative, self referenced. Christianity, disconnected from the Absolute, unchanging reference point that is God, becomes Progress, referenced only to what we moved on from yesterday.
You see this and you understand why prophets were wild men.
You’re very literally saying that to do what is natural is right.
You are abusing the word literal. Stop that.
No, Free Northerner is literally saying that using GNON, God of Nature or Nature, as an abstract concept is not blasphemy, but a metaphor. Jesus used metaphors to explain difficult concepts. GNON is used so that everyone does not have to write out that ignoring reality is not protection from the consequences of ignoring reality, over and over and over, again. The concept is that we still have to deal with reality even if we do not like it. Free Northerner is figuratively saying that better that we lose civilization than see it used to destroy souls beyond number. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.
The Shadowed Knight
@ Chad: Hades was the god of the underworld, he was also the underworld. He was death personified as both god and place. Christ used a pre-created personification of one of the natural states of man to make a point.
“You’re not writing in a metaphor. Or, if you are, it is purely a blasphemous one.”
Yes I am, the whole post is one extended metaphor. Cthulhu doesn’t exist and is used simply to represent a possible malevolent AI, Elua is from a fantasy novel and is used to represent a possible “progressive” AI, Nihil doesn’t exist and represents nothing but the loss of our humanity, Gnon does not exist as a person and is a metaphor for the laws of nature. The whole thing was an attempt at poetical metaphor.
Nor it it blasphemy. None of these reifications are being treated as God. The term god is being used metaphorically to refer to a being beyond the ability of man to fully comprehend. No one thinks of these personifications as being in any way sacred or worthy of worship or any way comparable to Jehovah. None of what I wrote is in any way contemptuous of God (The ‘Sons of Gnon’ was irreverent and I have already admitted the error, repented, and removed it.)
“You’re very literally saying that to do what is natural is right.”
You are mixing is and ought. There is no right or wrong about it. We are born in the natural world; we obey its laws or we die. If we don’t eat, we starve; if we don’t work, we don’t eat; if we don’t procreate, we go extinct; if we don’t kill the wolf, it will kill our flocks and us; if we are invaded by outsiders and they kill us all, we’re dead. Nature is neither good nor bad; it is simply as God made it.
God has given us mercies beyond those of the natural world, and offers us a regenerate nature even in this world, but until we die and are made anew we are still a part of the natural world, the material plane, and are still subject to the laws of nature. Just as we obey earthly rulers, we obey the laws of nature. It doesn’t mean we worship either Caesar or Gnon.
Even for those of us who are made new in the blood, we still have our primal natures, and these are not necessarily evil. When David was slaying Philistines do you doubt he was consumed by battle fury? When Samson was blessed by God, did he not fly into a brutal, primal rage? When the apostles stood before their persecutors answering them, do you doubt the adrenaline was rushing through them? Does not the Song of Solomon drip with primal passion?
Our natural passions are part of us. They are our humanity given by God. In anger, in sexual passion, in happiness, in hunger we can sin, but the anger, the passion, the happiness, the hunger are not sins in themselves.
“Whether you call the prince of this world Gnon or Elua, they’re both demons and devils. You’re saying you’d rather unchain one demon in order to destroy another. Either way, you’re playing their game on their rules and they always win at that game. Heads Satan wins, Tails you lose your soul. You’re saying you’d rather be of a world of practical wrath, brutal justice, red in claw and in tooth than be of a world of lust and gluttony. Both are demons and devils of sin. Don’t limit yourself to choosing only between two evils.”
Brutal justice and practical wrath are often used by men of God to destroy evil. How many tribes consumed by worship of their dark gods did the Israelites destroy at the Lord’s command? How many priests of Baal did Elijah butcher? How many Philistines fell to David’s blade? Did not God punish Saul for not destroying evil as fully as he was commanded? Did not Christ promise to return with a sword to strike down the nations in fury and wrath?
Should a holy war be necessary to fight off a metaphorical dark god leading our world to damnation, a holy war should be fought.
“O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!”
You fail to address that Hades is a place and can be translated as multiple things, and project your desire onto the translation.
You say that you’ll unchain Gnon, and then say you don’t worship or respect him.
You bring up the personification of sin, and then say your own personification of sin is free of sin.
You give into your flesh and passions, to ignore your soul and spirit.
Are you Abraham, bargaining with God to save the people if there is merely one righteous soul in the city? Are you Moses, the meekest man on Earth, arguing with God to have mercy on his chosen people? Are you David, saying that he has no right to kill a ruler put over him by God, no matter what atrocities Saul commits? Are you Elijah, who called upon God to show the righteousness of his cause through miracles before he would act? Are you the same prophet who spent days in the desert, alone, and fed mana by the hand of angels?
You have no understanding of God or scripture in relation to the capital sins or the virtues if you think that practical wrath or brutal justice have any place in God. You are pridefully calling for destruction, that sin might be answered with sin for the sake of good.
Your writing here does not call for a holy war, but an unholy one. How dare you call it a holy war when you are in no place of authority. How dare you call it a holy war when you have not one single reference to God, our Father, but only to Gnon and Elua, your princes to be given loyalty beyond that of God.
How dare you call it a Holy war without the Blood of the Lamb on a cross, but rather would sacrifice the lives of men for a god of your own making, a god based on a world filled with sin and steeped in practicality with an utter lack of love
Your idol sickens me
Chad, Am I misunderstanding something? I generally highly respect your thoughts, but am confused in this case as to why you are insisting on treating metaphors as actual existent beings. Why are you are insisting on treating literary flourishes as literal?
How many times do I have to say poetical metaphor?
The other commenters seem to understand the point.
“You fail to address that Hades is a place and can be translated as multiple things, and project your desire onto the translation. ”
Hades is only a place because the god of death, the personification of death, came to personify the realm he was said to inhabit as well.
“You say that you’ll unchain Gnon, and then say you don’t worship or respect him.”
It’s a metaphor: unchain Gnon is equivalent to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war”, no actual dogs are being let slip. (The Cthulhu reference, on the other hand, is to a hypothetical AI that was indifferent to humanity, so unchaining Cthulhu would be the equivalent of releasing one AI to destroy another).
As far as I recall, I never mentioned respect, but I respect Gnon in the same way I respect a tornado, heavy traffic, a loaded gun, or gravity; I assume you respect those as well. Respect does not equal worship. (Cthulhu wouldn’t be worship either).
“You bring up the personification of sin, and then say your own personification of sin is free of sin.”
How are the laws of nature sin?
“Are you…”
No. I know I am not worthy of being compared to them.
“You have no understanding of God or scripture in relation to the capital sins or the virtues if you think that practical wrath or brutal justice have any place in God”
I am from a protestant tradition, does the RC tradition have a special meaning attached to ‘practical wrath’ and ‘brutal justice’ I am unaware of? A couple of quick googles didn’t turn up anything.
Apart from a special meaning I am unaware of, practical wrath would be opposed to impractical wrath, ie. impotent seething. (As for wrath itself, I was thinking of it as defined in neutral anger sense, rather than in the cardinal sin sense). As for brutal justice, if the genocides inflicted by the Israelites are not brutal, then I’m unsure how you would define brutal.
“How dare you call it a holy war when you are in no place of authority.”
I have no authority to call for a holy war, but neither am I commanding one. One can argue for the death penalty without having the authority to kill, can one not? One can argue for criminals to be jailed without having the authority to jail them.
Likewise, in the case of the rise of a ‘progressive’ AI bent on enforcing empty hedonism on the world, I am arguing for holy war against it.
“How dare you call it a holy war when you have not one single reference to God, our Father, but only to Gnon and Elua, your princes to be given loyalty beyond that of God.”
Here you have a point, but I have written before that no single post I write exists in a vacuum, they are usually related to other posts I have written. In particular, to this post, the link at “…not made for the void.” makes a Biblical case on the emptiness of hedonism and the necessity of toil.
As well, this post is one in a series of interlinked posts I’ve been writing these last few weeks on civilzation, patriarchy, violence, Gnon, etc. that have had some attempts of mine at poeticism.
http://freenortherner.com/2014/07/20/patriarchy-civilization/
http://freenortherner.com/2014/07/25/weve-lost/
http://freenortherner.com/2014/07/27/the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings/
http://freenortherner.com/2014/08/01/cyclical-history/
The Cyclical History one in particular makes the Christian point. I wrote that one and this one, one day and the next and posted them up at the same time. To me these posts were heavily linked together, but it’s possible that didn’t get through.
“How dare you call it a Holy war without the Blood of the Lamb on a cross, but rather would sacrifice the lives of men for a god of your own making, a god based on a world filled with sin and steeped in practicality with an utter lack of love”
I called for violence in the destruction of a hypothetical AI set on world damnation and the destruction of civilization if the AI became synonymous with that civilization. I would sacrifice my own life and go to extreme measures to fight it; I assume others would as well. The hypothetical AI would be the equivalent of the Beast of Revelations, would you not do so?
It would not be for ‘a god’ (ie. Gnon). Again, unleashing Gnon is a metaphor for undoing the binds of civilization. If civilization is equivalent to an evil AI ‘god’ bent on forcing nihilistic hedonism, wouldn’t you be for undoing its binds?
“Your idol sickens me”
What idol?
I am not worshiping anything but God (the Trinitarian God of the Christian Creeds to be exactly specific) and am advocating others to no other form of worship.
Its early and I didnt get as much sleep as I usually desire before working, so I’ll skip to my main reason as to why I am vehemently arguing against Gnon or Elua.
My insistence lies in that I believe in demons and devils in a very real way as Christ did and demonstrated to have power greater than them. They are the fallen angels in league with Satan.
So when you start suddenly writing on services to gods, I don’t take that as lightly as you seem to. We live in a country where satanism and paganism is on the rise. There was one black mass that had been publicly planned, and eventually canceled due to religious activism on part of the faithful, in Boston earlier this year. Another is announced and planned in September an hour away from me in oklahoma City. So when a whole community suddenly makes up and has a war of gods, calls it a holy war, and Christian men and women take sides without any thoughts or references to God, it isnt something I see as without meaning nor happening in a void.
Whilr I understand that you are not “literally” sacrificing things upon an alter to these demons, how much time do they use your thoughts and attention that is not spent towards god but is towards them? How do you reconcile that Christ said that the man whom is angry at his brother has already killed him or the man that thinks adulterous and lustful thoughts is already guilty with the fact that in this very post you’re now rationalizing the use of wrath? How do you reconcile that these mere sins of internal temperaments are so talked of when merely concerning man; how much more important our internal disposition towards God!
In short, I very much believe that a stubborn continued use of a pagan way of thought via a pagan extended metaphor will make your thoughts and words more and more pagan over time until you are serving pagan gods and rationalization leads you either to think you do so in Gods name or completely away from Him altogether.
I have so vehemently defended and fought such thoughts here as I respect you in many ways and think you will listen to reason; I have much less hope in swaying any others. I have done so because you seem to have quickly and quietly embraced such thinking and it has led to what appears to be less Christian thoughts and posts and more pagan, along the path I described above.
As far as I can tell, this is the heart of all my objections previously stated, and if we are not on agreement here we will not come to terms on any other topic I have objected to.
Should you not believe in demons and devils as I do, I would still urge you to consider how, aside from supernatural reasons, making your logic sound like a pagan cult does disservice to your own thoughts and credibility.
In either case I do not believe that what you gain is worth what you are sacrificing to this metaphor and to these gods
I agree with Chad. My background is a fairly recent convert to Christianity who used to dabble in New Age stuff, and eventually came to see that there are dark forces at play in these sorts of practices. It starts small; but you can be slowly led into greater and greater ignorance and confusion, led by forces beyond your control, and be deceived into things you would not have originally consented to. You may think that you yourself are in control of this neopagan language you’ve adopted, but before you know it you may start tapping into forces that begin to control you.
Most modern day satanists probably think they’re joking around; that satan doesn’t exist and it’s all fun and games… Maybe in the beginning, but they will gradually become more and more truly satanic if they persist.
Now I don’t think you’re in as bad shape as an atheist dabbling in satanism; but this dabbling in neopagan language in this peculiar way is the first baby step down a very dark path.
I don’t have a problem with your use of “elua,” since it’s used to represent an evil, anti-human principle. It’s your use of pagan language to describe the ostensibly good forces that you want to serve that concerns me.
To illustrate this more specifically, the part of your post that most concerns me is:
“I will commit human sacrifice on the altar of the gods of savagery.”
Honestly gives me shudders. Human sacrifice is always and absolutely an intrinsic evil– one of the most condemned pagan practices in the Bible. So evil that God says he knew Israel would be sinful, but would have never imagined that they’d fall so low as commit human sacrifice.
Using it as a metaphor for a just holy war is perverse. There’s no way around it. You should never use an intrinsically evil action as a metaphor for something good.
I’ll use an amplified grotesque metaphor to amplify this point; so please excuse me for it, but I think it’s necessary to really drive this point home.
What if I said “I will rape children and drink their blood on the altar of the gods of savagery,”? Is there any way that this could be considered a decent Christian thing to say? What if I explained that it was merely a metaphor for arguing with progressives against homosexual marriage? “Rape” in this case means rational argument, because systematic logic is generally a masculine quality; and because it has the quality of possibly going against personal whims and subjective desires. “Children” because their minds are childish even if they’re adults. “Drinking their blood” refers to making them look foolish when they loose an argument, because they live on adulation and the false praise of men. And of course “the gods of savagery,” simply refers to truth, since truth can be savage to false preconceptions.
Would you for even a minute consider this a decent way to talk? That there’s nothing wrong with arguing with progressives against homosexual marriage does nothing to redeem such perverse language. In fact, it is worse in a way because it is clothing something good in objectively evil language.
Never mind that my hypothetical metaphor is more ridiculous than yours. Yours is all the more dangerous because it’s less obviously ridiculous. I’m no pacifist and not against holy war per se, but it should never be clothed in a metaphor for an intrinsically evil action such as human sacrifice.
I’m with Chad and Moose. This is foolishness. It is confusing and confused.
Has nationalism superseded tribalism, or hasn’t? Are bonds of blood the only ones worthy of cultivating? Do people always prioritize kinship over friendship? Why “brotherhood” (or sisterhood, lol) is commonly used as the figure of speech to describe compatriots or coreligionists, or more generally, people dedicated to a common cause? Are human loyalties divisible, or not?
Your post brings lot of questions up, if only indirectly. Good.
A metaphor can be carried too far and Christians can be too superstitious about the power of demons.
More interesting to me, in what ways does Christ reject the adaptive and “natural” wisdom. The Romans recognized this when they called Christians haters of mankind. Nietzsche and modern day NRX have a similar criticism of Christianity. Proverbs are wisdom from God for life in this world but Christ reveals a higher form of wisdom in rejecting the world.
Are NRXrs right? Is Christian charity so maladaptive that Christians should not be allowed any political power? If that is not correct, is it because we temper charity with a healthy dose of common sense, giving Gnon his due if you will (this appears to be the historical model)? Do we press charity to the maximum, leaving the consequences to God and Gnon be damned? I am using charity in a very broad sense such as open borders.
Barnabas, the modern definition of charity is a perversion of the Christian definition of charity, which churches have allowed to infiltrate into their lexicon. Read the Catholic definitions of charity and love as written by the saints if you want the true definition
In other words, you dont need to be pagan to know how to treat others. You simply must be Christian in the true sense and not a perversion of it
@ FN
“How many times do I have to say poetical metaphor?”
Generally speaking, if you want to use a metaphor I would go for a parable.
Jesus uses “word-picture” parables that pretty much any child can understand. I would agree with Cane that this was a pretty confusing/confused post.
Given that a number of Christian men whose thoughts I respect have objected to this post, it is obvious I have erred in creating it and it would be prideful foolishness to continue to defend it. Whatever my original intentions were, this post was, at best, poorly executed and ended in foolishness. I have added a disclaimer to the top of the post. I will have to contemplate my use of certain forms of imagery in the future.
@ Chad: Hmmm… That makes sense. I do believe in literal demons and false gods, but I never thought of any of the personifications I wrote of as literal beings.
The slippery slope into pagan thinking is something I will have to think on. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
@ TE: Thank you as well. You are right, in retrospect that metaphor was probably going too far.
@ Cane: It does seem to be confusing people and given the reaction to it, whatever I intended to write, it obviously ended in foolishness.
@ DS: Maybe so.
@ Free Northerner
Our interioir disposition and the ways in which we pursue God, as well as the lenses we chose to view the moral, metaphysical, and supernatural; drastically affect our minds and our souls.
While I am unsure if there are beings with the names Gnon or Elua (but would not rule it out of possibilities) I am completely sure there are beings that would take your looking for God’s Truth outside of God, give you truths of the world and temporal power, and lead you on a merry pagan chase towards damnation.
As Christians, we should never look for truth outside of God. If we find something to be true that has no immediate ties to God we should instantly be wary, on our guard, and search for the tie to either accept or reject the information in the same amounts God would.
If you would like to pursue wisdom in relation to the original post and the following conversation I have three suggestions:
The bible. The scripture revolving around Jeroboams golden calves is extremely pertinent to the extent that he meant to worship God but fell into paganism. The writings here made me think instantly of it – of Elua as a golden calf of docility and temporal gain, Gnon as a bronze bull of strength and fertility. They’re disturbing and false gods to be rejected, and I personally will not read anything by those who have not done so in the future. The second scripture would be of Ahab (I think?) who begins worshipping pagan gods and giving them due when the armies under them defeat him.any defeat of a Christian in this life is merely temporary as we are assured eternal victory. Whats more is that the right disposition will bring more glory to God than any other action one could take at that time; in return he will give you joy, graces to endure, and hold you in his loving heart, eternally pierced and exposed to us from heaven.
Should you desire outside wisdom, here are the two other recommendations I have.
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis has a great deal to say on the subject. I vocally and loudly object to some of his theology concerning salvation as he dips into the beginning of feminized ‘nice’ Christianity that eventually led to churchianity, but if you keep that in mind you won’t go wrong.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B002BD2UR0?cache=98d18a14182d495cc998888a96eb0092&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&qid=1407236172&sr=8-1#ref=mp_s_a_1_1
Four Cardinal Virtues by Josef Pieper. This other book I would recommend more. He is the clearest writer on virtue that I have come across that isnt hundreds of years old. He regularly quotes and dissects the wisdom of others before him; usually plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas; giving the reader a good bases of information able to immediately apply to himself and other sources to dig into after he’s done. He also explained how the virtues counter the capital sins. I think that after reading this you would have less need to rely upon metaphors, and less confusion on where Gods truth and the worlds begin and end in relation to how a man should live in this life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0268001030?cache=98d18a14182d495cc998888a96eb0092&pi=SY200_QL40&qid=1407236195&sr=8-2#ref=mp_s_a_1_2
@Chad
I think you’re straying too far in the direction of the gnostics in the last post. “We should never look for truth outside of God” is a questionable statement. Is anything outside of God, the author of everything? Newton’s famous apple is a source of knowledge within God, as God is the maker of Newton, his apple tree, and the faculty of reason which forms part of the image of God in Man. Knowledge from the natural world can only be outside of God if God is not the author of Nature, and this statement is gnostic heresy. Sin is not an error of knowledge but of will. All wisdom is of God, scriptural or natural, because God is wisdom, in the same way that all love and justice is of God. Christian anti-rationalism is a heresy that comes from the mistaken idea that the world is not a creation of God but a creation of Satan. Satan is the governor, temporarily, and the Kings of the World bow to him, for now, but the world itself is Good (Gen. 1).
If I stick my hand in fire, it burns. If I snort drugs, I destroy my mind. I don’t need the gospel to tell me these things, yet that knowledge, too, comes from God. If I build my society on a false principle, it collapses. The cruelty of a burnt hand is not evil, but the natural consequence of living one’s life in disorder, when Man was made to live in accordance to God’s will. Just as your leg will not bend over your head, your soul will not bend in ways which are against human nature.
“There is a kingdom of God and a kingdom of Man, a kingdom of grace and a kingdom of wrath. To put wrath in the kingdom of God or grace in the kingdom of Man is to put Satan in heaven and Christ in hell.” – Martin Luther, Against the Murdering and Stealing Hordes of Peasants.
So yes, painful principles of nature are of God. Natural laws that are harsh are of God. Re-read your Romans 13. God places the sword in the hand of the Prince to be a terror unto the wicked. The Prince is obligated to be terrifying, especially a Christian Prince, because the wicked are deterred only by fear and destruction, lest they tyrannize the Church. Luther is your best source on this materiel. The message of Christ mitigates the cruelty of the world in the next world, not this one. In this one, man must labor by the sweat of his brow for his bread, he must fight the evil of the world to protect his wife, home, and children (Neh. 4:14), and he must sacrifice his own needs to provide for the children of his house (1 Tim. 5:8). You can call it God’s Law, or you can call it Economics, Military Science, and Biological Reproduction. In short, we are bound by Nature’s Law because God is author of Nature.
Look! God has given me a gift. A man who would have benefited if he had read my recommendations falling into the same traps he would have avoided in trying to prove me wrong.
Let us try our metal, and see if theres any iron to sharpen us here.
First, a primer on Gnosticism:
“Whereas Judaism and Christianity, and almost all pagan systems, hold that the soul attains its proper end by obedience of mind and will to the Supreme Power, i.e. by faith and works, it is markedly peculiar to Gnosticism that it places the salvation of the soul merely in the possession of a quasi-intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulae indicative of that knowledge. Gnostics were “people who knew”, and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know”
My statement, when taken out of context, is indeed questionable. However, when discussing morality, how a man of the faith should act, and his inner disposition towards God it is nothing of the sort and in no way denies reality.
What it does say is that we cannot know God’s will for how man should treat God and his fellow man solely through a study of the material world, of pagan life styles/culture/religion, or even by success.
Much of the rest of your post is a demonstration that you have no idea of what the virtue you hold in such high esteem, wisdom, means.
Prudence is not knowledge, information, nor IQ. Prudence is not even seeing what will succeed nor what will fail. Prudence is having the gift of being able to discern what God would have you do by knowing his Will. Prudence is understanding that the Natural Law and the Divine Law are not the same.
“There is a kingdom of God and a kingdom of Man, a kingdom of grace and a kingdom of wrath. To put wrath in the kingdom of God or grace in the kingdom of Man is to put Satan in heaven and Christ in hell.” – Martin Luther, Against a horde of peasants to whom his own actions of rebellion against the Church and the authorities God placed above him, which the peasants found when comparing rebellion against the infinite God or a mere man, demonstrated to said peasants that man must be ok to rebel against.
So yes, thanks for making my point. How we approach God and view him in the silence of our hearts makes a difference. Luther did not hold to that, and his rebellious nature created more rebellion. Strange how the fruits of his labor resulted in reaping exactly what he sowed.
Biological laws of reproduction will not tell you its a sin to cuckold your neightbor, and in fact encourage it if you can get away with it.
Economic laws do not tell you one must give a man his just wages when you’re in a position to take advantage of him
Military science does not tell you when a war is just.
In this world you can find any rationalization one desires to call good evil and evil good. Which is exactly how the flaws of modernity occured; when man pridefully determined he could find everything he needed to know in the world, without God’s help.
The world will only tell you, directly, about the world. The world will only tell you indirectly about God. This is because there is sin and devils in the world. This is because God allows evil, but does not will evil, and neither good nor evil are tied to successfully living when using worldly definitions instead of eternal ones. For every eternal truth you see in the world, the world will try to trick you into accepting ten other truths of the world as truths of God’s will.
Pursue wisdom as a hunter, realizing that a holy fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and remembering that one does not successfully hunt deer by tracking dung beetles rolling around in shit.
Free Northerner:
I know those were not easy words to write. You have shown yourself to take Ecc 7:5 seriously. Your handling of this matter is to be commended.
…and moose shows himself to be a better man than I, who lost sight of his brother’s eternal salvation in order to preach a message of my own.
Free Northerner, my apologies.
Moose, thank you for correctly stating what needed to be said and showing the way forward
Let me expand your primer on Gnosticism. The essence of this heresy is an extreme dualism between God and Creation, borne of an egotistical reaction to the alienation of sin. Rather than accepting that they are in the wrong, they cannot blame themselves for sin, but blame Creation, and therefore Creation’s God. They desire not themselves to be redeemed, but Creation to be redeemed. At this point, they are approached by a “Hidden God” who commonly calls himself the “Light-bringer” or “Illumined One”. The Gnostic concludes that the Creator is false and the Illumined One is the true God. The Illumined One offers secret knowledge, the gnosis that you described before, which supposedly gives the Gnostic the power to make himself master of Creation and remake it in his own image. Hence the superiority: the Leftist… oops, I mean Gnostic, believes himself to be a Master of Creation and the uninitiated to be his clay.
I will return to this later. St. Thomas addresses Eternal and Natural Law in Summa Theologica, starting around Question 93. Eternal Law is a name for the pure, unfiltered will of God, and it is essentially unknowable. Derived from Eternal Law are two lesser, yet knowable Laws. First is Sacred Law: scripture and canon. Second is Natural Law: the knowledge of right and wrong that comes from reason and experience.
You made one error in your judgment of Natural Law: you took too shallow of a viewpoint in addressing it. As St. Augustine says in his City of God, one must take the viewpoint of eternity, rather than the viewpoint of a single lifetime, in analyzing earthly, political law. The adulterer and cheat seem to prosper, in your example, only for a single lifetime. From the viewpoint of eternity, wherein Man is not a single being but a living chain of fathers and sons, adultery breaks the chain of paternity, shatters the order of society, and demolishes all tradition and culture. Natural Law always condemns decadence, from the perspective of the eternal.
Second, as Nature is created by God, it bears his image, in a lesser degree than Man. I could use John Dun Scotus, but since he’s been eclipsed by the Thomists, I’ll use St. Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God. In his “Ladder”, the first three rungs involve the study of justice and nature, without the aid of scripture. Just as God made Nature, he gave to each thing a telos, a purpose or end, which moves that thing to his ends (Summa Contra Gentiles 3:1:65) and the existence of evil does not thwart the will of God. Every man, kingdom, and season begins and ends according to the plan, so a wide view of the whole, rather than a narrow view of the singular, shows the pattern of God’s will on Creation. This, as St. Bonaventure says, is the initiation into wisdom that Scripture requires before one can understand it.
Hence, the Will of God can only be known in mediation, by scripture and by reason in concert (to use the Thomist definition). Claims to know the Will of God without mediation, or through scripture alone without judgment or reason touch on the Gnostic, as the person is claiming a source of secret knowledge. God has no secret knowledge which he keeps for chosen ones; even those gifted with prophesy are commanded to go forth and tell what they know. Scripture has no secret lessons that are unavailable to any who studies with an open mind and heart.
I would agree that the original post erred in reliance on earthly knowledge without the mediation of scripture. The Law of Nature serves a purpose other than survival: it expresses the Will of God on Creation. If anything happens, it is because God allowed it to happen. Hence it has purpose, and one should attempt to know the purpose, for that is how mere mortals can understand their role in the Lord’s plan. Most of us will never get a message from an angel in a dream, that is reserved for prophets and saints. We must divine our role in Creation from reason, experience, and judgment, praying that we have enough of all three to avoid deception.
“Claims to know the Will of God without mediation, or through scripture alone without judgment or reason touch on the Gnostic, as the person is claiming a source of secret knowledge. ”
Mediation can also be a source of error grown old. But lack of mediation does give room to gnosticism no doubt as many authors of confusion has shown. However the scripture given proper exegesis yields its sweet fruit of truth.
This is a very sad discussion.
Every single person in this comment thread radically underestimates the potential good that could be accomplished by a human-friendly artificial intelligence. Narrowly defining a beneficial artificial intelligence as “progressive” (as if the popular construal of a 21st century political alignment is something mathematically concrete that an AI could even optimize) is almost infinitely reductive.
Who could ever defend a moral calculus wherein permanently saving all sentient beings from suffering is a bad thing?
I think there’s a confusion here. The aim of FAI/Elua would be to “save mankind.” This pattern-matches to the role of Jesus Christ as the savior. Therefor being in favor of Elua is blasphemous.
This is fuzzy thinking. Is it blasphemous for a man to desire to become more Christlike? Is it sacrilegious to try to glorify God, to do good, to serve one’s brother, while on earth? Are you competing with God because you’re trying to accomplish His aims? Obviously not. So why is creating a machine dedicating to accomplishing his aims sacrilegious? If I am very careful to refer to the machine as an It instead of a Him, very careful never to refer to the power of the machine as God-like, does it cease to become obscene?
This is discussion entirely about language and connotation and thus entirely misses that actuality of the issue – that it is notionally possible to build a machine that could do practically infinite good, and when I say good I mean Good. Being against the creation of such a machine would be aiding and abetting Satan, because a Good-producing machine could only be the work of the Lord.