It seems the British have decided to jump out of the frying pan into the fire and to exchange venal incompetents for a group of people ideologically committed to the destruction of the country as it has been. Could this be the moment when the sleep of Albion descends into nightmare?
It is understandable that the electorate wanted to punish the incumbent government, conservative in name only, but the choice they have made will plunge the country into deeper misery. I am not talking in economic or political terms so much here as, important as they are, those are secondary issues. I am referring to the spiritual darkness which will intensify under the new government as it pursues its agenda of dismantling the entirety of tradition and replacing it by rigid bureaucratic control and enforced egalitarianism or Eurocommunism as you might call it. Those who oppose this will be accused, like the early Christians, of being haters of humanity but the idea of love has long since been corrupted and used as a weapon to attack the good, the beautiful and the true. Freedom of thought will be increasingly curtailed with the excuse of safety, equality and fairness. The new prime minister has spoken of his desire to stamp out something called Islamophobia. This may be a cynical vote catcher but nevertheless only someone who has no love for his country or for Jesus Christ could speak in those terms.
The new UK government has achieved a landslide with a relatively small percentage of the vote. They have far more power than would normally be the case given the relative paucity of their support. They managed this because their opponents were split and one has to wonder if this was a tactic of those who pull the strings behind the scenes. I don't say the Reform party was consciously set up to give the left greater power but it has surely been used to do just that. I can understand why so many people turned to it because it asks some of the right questions but it doesn't have any real answers. The rot is too deep.
Bruce Charlton has spoken of the two forms of evil at play here, that which seeks control (Ahrimanic) and that which seeks destruction (Sorathic). As usual, his analysis is spot on. The previous government was Ahrimanic in a passive sense because it had no real beliefs, but the new one will be actively so because it does have beliefs though they are anti-God beliefs. Naturally, they are not framed like that but these beliefs spring from a rejection of God and the natural order of creation. We can never understand why the modern world is as it is until we realise that we are in a spiritual war. The enemy cannot win but it can do enormous damage to people's souls before it loses, and that is what the whole business is all about. And although the enemy cannot incarnate directly in the world, it can certainly influence and overshadow human beings that allow this because of their inner emptiness and spiritual rejection. This has become more of a likelihood.
Ultimately, none of this matters. Our task is only to recognise it and stay faithful to God. If humanity is to be healed then its spiritual sickness must come out. This is what we are witnessing.
6 comments:
@William - At the very least, I hoped that if we had learned anything, and with the choice of parties and people on offer; the UK people would have refused to vote in unprecedented numbers.
But apparently (if the stats I saw were valid) something like 2/3 of the possible voters actually participated in the evil charade and cast a vote... A 2-1 majority still believe that voting in elections is appropriate and useful.
That is actually what I find most depressing about the whole thing - and which leads me to expect very little or no resistance to what is about to hit us.
There is still the widespread belief that if you don't vote you deserve whatever you get. But in the present case voting just perpetuates the charade.
So basically things are exactly as expected, and nothing has changed in the world of men since the Buddha rose up and said the world is on fire, and the Prophets thundered about the evils of men and their blindness :)
Since this world is not the final one anyways, and the world will be remade as it originally was meant to be by God, as Christianity assures us, there is cause for ultimate cheer. This ruler of this world as we know is is who we know, anyways. Proximate gloom and ultimate good cheer seems to be the only sane approach. And yet I fear too many people lose sight of the ultimate good cheer that true religion promises, and reading religious writers today is too apt to be a study in doom and gloom with no redeeming brightness.
And yet what ought to distinguish the religious from the secular is an acknowledgement of how awful the world is but also an ultimate good hope...else we might as well be secular nihilists.
In the meantime, the task is as it has ever been for us as individuals and communities - create as much beauty and do as much good as we can, align ourselves with as much good and beauty and truth as we can. That is our task, even as the world is on fire and collapsing. And it is primarily a spiritual task - politics is pointless.
Such a life gives happiness even now and leads on to our eternal home...and can help save at least some others like us.
Anonymous, that's just why I wrote that ultimately none of this matters. That having been said, I do think we need to recognise that it is not just same old, same old now. There is a greater spiritual evil in our day than ever before because God and the natural order have been rejected. That has never happened to this all-embracing extent before.
You do say that, which I appreciate. One must always provide that larger perspective from which our troubles give way to hope, I believe, and you did do that.
It's true that our times the majority have embraced materialistic nihilism, and that is likely unprecedented - materialistic nihilism existed in ancient times as well, there was an a notable philosophic school in ancient India that preached materialism, nihilism, and hedonism, just like today, but while notable enough to be recorded it was not embraced by the majority and didn't become the basis of society.
But I sometimes feel that there have been societies in the past with a spirituality so low and limited and hopeless that it is not so dissimilar from our times - consider the Iliad, even, while a great poem depicts a hopeless extremely violent world in which there is essentially no life after death (one becomes a mere shadow with no substance or ability to feel joy), and the best thing in life is a banal and boring "fame".
Or consider the Aztecs, who believed the world was ruled by evil gods who must be propitiated by human sacrifice on an industrial scale or the gods would destroy the world.
Or some of the older Near Eastern empires and the "idol worship" they were given to - no high, ennobling spirituality there, but a fear based and anxiety driven propitiation of lesser deities and a focus on material objects as divine receptacles without any majestic conception of a transcendent unitary God beyond all things and in all things and embracing the All. (Perhaps proto materialism).
And in general the old Testament describes a world full of horrible societies and actions, existing on a very low level. Indeed the Prophets seem to describe a mankind absolutely sunk in the worst kinds of evil.
So while I agree that our situation is unique and unprecedented in many ways, the world has always been rotten since the beginning of recorded history - and certain periods and places may have had it almost as bad in different ways. Of course, before recorded history there was Eden :)
What can one say. It's the Kali Yuga - darkness accelerates before the world is made new again, and no doubt the general trend, overall, has been downward since history began.
Your examples are all very pertinent and I certainly agree with your general point. Perhaps what distinguishes the present time is the universality of the materialistic nihilism and the fact that it arose from an existing knowledge of Christ. Previous societies didn't have that advantage. Also, there is the rejection of the natural order of being. This seems to be more embedded now.
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