Bruce Charlton's Notions

*
I am under no illusion but that Mormonism is Incredible in the sense that it severely strains credibility, and simply seems ridiculous, absurd, disgusting to the standards of normal public discourse.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/mormonism-poised-between-incredibilities.html

However, mainstream Christianity is incredible also, and in exactly the same way and by the same type of criteria (Incredible that is, to the external observer, who is neither mainstream nor Mormon) - which is to say: to accept any kind of Christianity is to accept the Incredible, and to reject Christianity is also to accept the Incredible.

Christianity is Incredible, Mormon Christianity is Incredible-squared.

*

Therefore neither mainstream Christianity nor Mormon Christianity should be presented as anything other than Incredible - because to do so is to misrepresent.

And because to do so is to diminish: positive transforming power is a consequence of Incredibility; so if our faith is in something less than the Incredible, then it is partial and enfeebled. 

If Incredible things are to be rejected, then both Christianity and Mormon Christianity should be rejected.

*

But of course, the truth of Mormon Christianity is NOT entailed by the truth of mainstream Christianity - one can (the vast majority of Christians have and do) rationally embrace the Incredibility of mC while rejecting the incredibility of MC.

(The opposite is not possible - if someone believes that Mormonism is true then that does entail accepting the essential truth of mainstream Christianity.)

*

So it is reasonable, and indeed usual, for mainstream Christians to reject Mormon Christianity as Incredible-hence-untrue; however, they should be aware that precisely the same qualitative point can equally-reasonably be made against mainstream Christianity - if that Christianity is to be positive and transforming.

Only the Incredible can save us: only the Incredible would offer us everlasting life as Sons of God.

Our choice, here and now, is between Incredibilities - or despair.

*

*
As I have written (see references below): Christianity is incredible, and Mormonism is incredible-squared. In that sense it is perfectly reasonable to reject either or both - because there is no requirement for us to assent to the incredible.

However, rejecting Christianity and Mormonism simply because they are incredible makes no sense either - because that rejection itself leads to incredible conclusions.

*

To focus on Mormonism - it really is incredible that Joseph Smith (of all people!) should be a prophet of God and that the provenance of the Book of Mormon was as described (gold plates, angels, translating devices etc), and that Joseph's BoM translation really derives from a lost ancient manuscript.

So it might, superficially, seem straightforward to disbelieve these things. Let's call this the skeptical alternative. But what then?

Of course, most people who reject Mormonism as incredible have a rooted negative prejudice against it, do not know the whole story, and/ or they have wildly false or distorted ideas about Mormonism.

But if you approach the subject of Mormonism with a benign and sympathetic attitude, are honest and informed; then we can see that the skeptical alternative is also clearly incredible; because it requires on the one hand that Joseph Smith was both a genius and also a calculated fraud, who led a water-tight conspiracy; and furthermore that the CJCLDS grew from a foundation of fraud and conspiracy to become the (overall) highly positive and wholesome influence it is today.

*

But yet again, the skeptical alternative - while incredible and unprecedented - is not impossible.

It is possible to imagine or suppose that a fraudulent genius and a watertight conspiracy did indeed, by chance and against the original intent, lead to great good - why, not?

This belief goes against common sense and reasonable expectation, but it could be true. 

*

But then, if we are honest and rigorous enough to apply this kind of negative, skeptical alternative reasoning to other domains of life - such as other religions, the history of politics, science etc.; then we will find that they also crumble away into what could be fiendish conspiracies.

In particular, we will be compelled to notice that Mormonism grew under the microscope of the mass media, and is vastly documented compared with other world religions and major Christian denominations.

We may reflect that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence when it comes to these other religions, and that much of the 'evidence' about early Mormonism is both ignorant and dishonest - as well as rootedly hostile...

In the end, no matter where we turn, or how we twist and twist about - we cannot escape incredibilities: we really can't. Not if we are honest and rigorous. 

*

The above is not by any means a proof of the validity of Mormonism - it is not intended as such, and I do not believe that there can be any such proof even in principle.

And what applies to Mormonism in small, applies to Christianity in large - the Christian story is packed with incredibilities and inconsistencies; yet to reject Christianity as incredible entails believing in some combination of delusion and conspiracy of a kind that is itself incredible, because grossly contradictory to actual behaviour and historical consequences.

It is that same skeptic's dilemma - Christianity could be based on delusion and fraud- that is not-impossible - it is just highly incredible. That path offers no escape from incredibility.

*

My point is that the impulse to avoid believing incredible things is mistaken, a basic error; because it is impossible. The notion of an incredibility-free belief system is an illusion and a snare.

Indeed, the urge to avoid incredibilities leads to the deep-rooted dishonesty and wilful self-blindness typical of the person who prides and advertises himself on being A Skeptic that relies only on Evidence.

(I mean the kind of man [we all know them - you may be one of them!] who applies skepticism only where and when it suits him, and blandly denies the incredibility of his own favoured incredibilities.)

But neither the skeptic not the credulous ever can or will avoid believing not just one but many incredibilities.

Incredible beliefs are simply a fact of life. 

*

This can be taken in two ways - either as meaning that we cannot believe anything because we could believe anything; OR that this is the way things are meant to be - and that it is a necessary and desirable part of the human condition that foundational belief require an act of choice from each of us as individuals.

To believe that fundamental beliefs cannot and should not be wholly-dictated by objective public 'evidence' and 'reason' but necessarily require an act of personal choice is, of course standard mainstream Christianity - it is what is meant by Faith.

Skeptics assume that the only alternatives are either being convinced by conclusive and credible evidence to reach credible conclusions on rational grounds; or else just believing whatever incredibility you want and calling it 'faith'...

But Christians deny that these alternatives exhaust all possibilities, and also deny that the skeptical possibility is coherent (for the reasons given above).

*

So what should we do, each, as individuals? Does everyone have to believe in Mormonism because it is incredible, or because everything else is at least equally incredible? Obviously not!

The Mormon answer is that each interested person as an individual has the possibility of investigating the evidence - and each must (and inevitably will) then make a choice. But people should not believe in Mormonism unless that choice is validated-by, or indeed comes-from, divine revelation.

Evidence is relevant, but never conclusive. Each person who professes Mormonism needs to, and must have, faith.

And exactly the same ought to apply to any Christian denomination. To be any kind of Christian (rather than just doing things that Christians do) requires faith; and that faith is based on individual choice; and that choice - to be valid - is not arbitrary but divinely inspired.

*

Is this a process without any possibility of error? No.

Can we be sure and confident that divine validation has happened? Yes.

But might we then change our mind about things we used to be certain about, or doubt our own certainty? Yes.

Does this then mean that truth is relative and arbitrary and we can believe anything or nothing? No.

*

Truth is real, humans are fallible, certainty is possible, faith is necessary.

These just are the facts, and we must work with them - we have no alternative: we must choose, and we will choose and indeed we have already chosen (although not irrevocably).

* *

References

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/mormonism-poised-between-incredibilities.html

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/mainstream-christianity-is-incredible.html

That's today's aphorism - an encouragement to think of, to formulate, Christianity as something common-sensical in its mechanisms and causality, yet incredible in its claims.

Incredibility - It is an error to try and 'normalize' Christianity, to claim that it is obvious and no big deal - that being Christian is merely the product of reason and logic and solid history and that one would have to be uninformed, dishonest or crazy not to believe it.

Actually, Christianity is incredible, stretching of credibility - hard to believe because its claims are so extreme and astonishing; and incredible too in the scope and power of its truth when that truth is understood.

And if 'reasonableness' is one extreme to be avoided, so is paradox. Paradox, beloved of a certain type of intellectual (Charles Williams?) is not sophisticated but a failure to understand. Paradox stuns - it fails to bridge the worldly and heavenly, this life and the next - sooner or later paradox leads to despair; therefore it must be shunned.

When we try to explain Christianity to modern people we should be prepared that it will probably sound to them both as simple as a child's fairy tale and as unbelievable as a child's fairy tale.

It is a mistake to soften this impact, or to dress it up with philosophical imprecision and paradox masquerading as complexity, or to try and diffuse the impact of the strangeness and apparent absurdity of Christianity in a world where nothing is finally believed except that nothing is really real.

Because the bottom line is that Christianity is a story - essentially, the story told by the gospels; extended to including our own personal place in the story - which makes it real - and as a story Christianity  resists explanation in terms of 'meaning' (or philosophy) - just as a children's fairy tale becomes alien and unrecognisable when its supposed meaning is explained by an anthropologist, folklorist, or psychologist.

As so often, Tolkien got to the nub of it: Christianity is a Fairy Story that is true - it is the true Fairy Story. The implication, which Tolkien himself didn't follow up - but which CS Lewis did - is that Christianity ought to be explained as a Fairy Story, without compromising in the direction of modern notions of plausibility.

The story is told - and then we must each, as individuals, seriously ask God concerning its truth - ask God within us by meditation, ask God the Father in prayer... whatever - but that is how we can and indeed must evaluate the truth of a story.

(And once we know the story is true, then we can - if we need or wish to - spend the rest of its life in understanding just how it is true.)

*

It is a fair question - because Christianity promises so much more than any other religion or ideology that the only reason not to believe it is if it is not true.

*

But it is not open to you to reject Christianity on the basis that it is incredible, impossible - the testimony of history closes that option.

(And modern economics, science and technology makes no difference whatsoever to the argument.)

Christianity has been believed by greater men than you or I or any alive today; men of greater wisdom, intelligence, experience, goodness, truthfulness.

*

It is not open to reject Christianity because it seems immoral, evil, harsh, judgemental, intolerant, repressive or for any other moral criticism.

Anyone who thinks this is simply ignorant of Christianity (as well as being ignorant of the alternatives).

*

A rational person would want Christianity to be true. The only question is whether it is true.

*

There is substantial evidence of the truth of Christianity, but only if you actively look for it, and the evidence is not overwhelming and can be denied.

Nobody is compelled to be Christian by the evidence alone.

*

It is interesting that in the past 200 years (as well as before) nobody has come up with a better offer than Christianity.

Perhaps no better offer can be conceived?

Perhaps wishful thinking cannot imagine anything better?

*

There certainly are better offers than Christianity for making a utopia in this world, there are offers for extending this kind of life indefinitely - but in Christian terms of eternity and perfection, these are infinitely inferior to the Gospel message; and leave untouched the ineradicable existential horror of this world and this life.

*

If Christianity does not strike you as too good to be true, then you haven't understood it properly.

Christianity certainly is too good to be true in human terms; and yet it is rational and coherent, neither ridiculous nor absurd.

Whether or not it is true is all that matters; which alternative is something that each man can only discover for himself - and intentionally so.

(That just is how things are set-up, for reasons you will understand if you become a Christian, but not until then.) 

*
 

*

My all-time, most-often-hit post from this blog (with about 6500 page views) is a journalistic-style article I published in the Mensa magazine on the disadvantages of high IQ

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/disadvantages-of-high-iq.html

This is interesting for several reasons: one is that I would not have predicted this would be the most popular thing I wrote; another is that the topic of IQ is apparently one of considerable general interest.

*

The three big disadvantages of high IQ which I listed were atheism, socialism and low fertility.

In a nutshell, I regard the modern high IQ elite member as a relatively recent product of rapid natural selection (some several or many hundreds of years) - of fast adaptation to the powerful selection pressure of a type of agrarian society - and like almost all examples of rapidly evolved adaptations this is achieved at a cost in pathology.

There are levels of complexity of evidence and analysis to debate - but I am pretty sure that there is an underlying causal relationship behind these phenomena, something I also tried to capture in the Clever Silly concept - that the highly intelligent lack Common Sense.

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html

Atheism, socialism, low fertility are aspects of a psychological pathology which was a by-product of rapid evolution of high intelligence.

(Naturally, these are products of some underlying disorder which would be expressed differently in different environments; and naturally a.s.lf are quantitative amplifications of pre-existing traits - they are not completely new traits. Rapid adaptation can only amplify what already exists.)

*

Since we currently live in a society dominated by high IQ atheist, leftists who are uninterested-by and hostile-to marriage, families and children - and since our public discourse is professional and essentially consists of the mass media backed by the systems of law, education and government - we are in the historically and geographically incredible position that ordinary common sense and personal experience have been all-but abolished.

Our world is abstract and theoretical - and this applies not only to the high IQ elite, but pretty much across the board, affecting nearly everybody.

So that Christianity - and traditional, orthodox supernaturalist religion of any kind - now strikes many people as not so much false as merely bizarre and foolish.

*

This applies even to, perhaps most of all to, the academic work of scholars, philosophers, scientists and the like. Anti-Christianity among these groups often boils down to the plain fact that they cannot take Christianity seriously, for them it is not even wrong, but simply crazy or manipulative.

Look hard at the arguments of mainstream modern cultural intellectuals building upon centuries of this tradition: they have the built-in and foundational assumption that obviously Christianity is untrue - and therefore anything which might tend to lead to acknowledgement of Christianity is also obviously untrue... and this is the position from which they begin.

Their reasoning may lead almost-anywhere except to Christianity, their conclusions might be almost anything except Christianity.

I speak from decades of experience inside this abstract theoretical and anti-Christian perspective.

*

So we, in this society, are living in a bubble of discourse qualitatively distinct from that of any other society in history and in about half the contemporary world - a bubble in which religion has been demoted from being the most important thing in life to being regarded a ludicrous farrago of made-up stuff: literally 'beneath contempt'.

Since all common sensical people have always been and still are religious, and since all children are spontaneously religious - this represents an extraordinary state of affairs.

*

As a society we have created a swirling bubble of abstract theories we term public discourse, within which we have trapped ourselves so that it sometimes seems that nothing we feel or experience can ever break us free.

As those who man the continual process of bubble production - intellectuals are most deeply implicated.

But it is worth remembering that the bubble of abstract theory standing between us and reality is a vastly resource-consuming phenomenon - sustainable only by the kind of scientific, technological and economic production which the bubble itself destroys by its denial of reality.

This is the nature of evil, characteristic of evil - evil is destructive, negative, nihilistic: it is anti-Good which means anti-real.

*

The atheist, leftist, anti-marriage/family/children perspective of modernity is essentially evil, yet of course it does contain Good - for example, it values kindness and hates suffering.

Yet the evil behind secularism would eventually destroy even those Goods, leaving immediate pleasure as the only value, and secularism would become cruel and sadistic with collapse into a universal war of each against all - which if carried-through to completion and the triumph of darkness (in this world) would ultimately lead to a single victor, who then killed himself...

*

Thus our abstract theoretical world - this creation of the Clever Silly high IQ and anti-Christian elites - is not working to impose an alternative reality, it is un-reality: it denies even itself, it operates to destroy even itself.

*

I don't find it surprising that most people in the world - past and present - find Christianity incredible, ridiculous or outrageous - at any rate: unbelievable. That was how it struck me, for most of my life.

In the West this is mostly because the official assumption of all adolescents and adults in public discourse - is that there is neither purpose nor meaning to human life: it is all a consequence of abstract processes, grinding-away because that is what they do.

But in most of the world, where a God is believed and assumed, Christianity is recognised to be an assertion of the limitations of God: that God is a person, and concerned with this world. For many that is a human limitation imposed on an unknowably great God - who can only be discussed indirectly, by negations and abstractions.

And, most strongly, other religions recognise that for Christians God is limited. Non Christians recognise that Christianity is an assertion that God is Not omnipotent - that there are things God cannot do. Such is implied by the Christian assertion that Jesus Christ was necessary.

If Jesus is necessary (and assuming he is not just a projection of God, an 'avatar') then there is something vital that God could not do; and that Jesus was needed to do.

This seems obvious to other religions; and it really ought to be obvious to Christians; however most Christian intellectuals deny these obvious inferences. Many Christians assert that God is omnipotent and also needs Jesus, who is a different person than God. Christians assert that God is unknowably great - omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent - and also loves each individual person as a Father.

And this is, and always has been, a weakness of Christianity; a weakness that looks very much like dishonesty. Christians should stop attempting to 'have it both ways'; and to admit that - increasingly this fails to convince, for the simple reason that it does not make sense (at least, it does not make 'common sense').  

If Jesus Christ is regarded as a fact and as a necessity; then it ought to be possible for Christians to accept the implications of that core belief - rather than to insist on fitting this into an idea of God as impersonal and abstract, all-powerful, and not-human: utterly alien - a concept that was, ultimately, derived from Non Christian religions.

*

How important is death?

So important that God had to become mortal and die - in order that we could be saved (to everlasting life).

This is the mystery of Christ's incarnation and atonement. Why did God need to become a Man and actually die in order to make salvation possible?

This is, I think, what seems so impossible and ridiculous to other (non-Christian) monotheists - the idea that Almighty God the creator would have to become a Man and die in order to save Mankind!

This is 'incredible', not obvious, not common sense - it is more a doctrine of the weakness of God, the limitations of God, than of His power - yet it is close to the essence of Christianity: pretty much what all Christians must believe to be Christian.

Christianity - it's literally incredible.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/is-christianity-too-good-to-be-true.html

*

This is just an example of the way my mind 'works' - the way a train of thought emerges, gets picked-up and followed-through...

I was thinking about Alan Garner's novel Boneland, which I disliked pretty strongly - but which (being by Garner) had some interesting aspects that stuck in the mind and worked there. One was that the protagonist Colin was a radio-astronomer who was (somehow) using the Jodrell Bank astronomical radio-telescope to try and dicover signs of his long-lost sister Susan in the night sky.

It is never explained what he was trying to do, what he expected to find or why - but that basic idea rather fascinated me: using a vast radio telescope to look for someone in the night sky.


I was also thinking, as one does, about the extraordinary fact of resurrection: that Jesus did not only promise us eternal life, as our-selves, but life everlasting as embodied persons. Eternal life might have been (usually is) thought to be in the form of a spirit; but no - we Christians are going to live forever with bodies. Amazing!

Because everything we know about bodies - in this world, in our mortal lives - suggests that a body could not be eternal; that it would (soon or late) wear-out, get-broken or somehow destroyed - maybe exploded... Yet not so: we will live forever, and we will have bodies.


(No wonder that so many people think Christianity incredible, in the sense of beyond credibility! No wonder so many Christians play-down this aspect of the faith - and indeed seem secretly, implicitly, to believe is discarnate spirit life beyond death.)


So, those who love, have faith in, follow Jesus will live forever in bodies that will not age, will not suffer disease - and are indestructible.

And since these are bodies, they have a location. Heaven is not some abstract state of being or consciousness - it must be an actual place (or places), inhabited by solid-bodied immortal human deities.


Where, then, is Heaven?

Well, I don't know - but it must be somewhere (or several/many somewheres). And, since it is apparently not here on earth - Heaven might well be somewhere in 'outer space' - somewhere out there among the stars...

Maybe a planet, or (and this is where it starts getting weird) it could be a star...  because if resurrected Men are indestructible, then they could inhabit... well, anything; even including a star that is hot enough to melt rock, hot enough to fuse hydrogen.

(Just imagine that! Being able to go right up to, get inside, our sun - or some other star...)


Therefore... Maybe it was not such a crazy idea for Colin to look for his sister Susan (who had 'died' from this world, in some way) among the stars, and - given that she may have become an immortal (small-g) god - maybe it would be possible for her to signal her presence to her brother in a way detectable by radio telescope; if, for whatever reason, there was some purpose to her doing so.

All of which brings an interesting new aspect to looking at the night sky: a fair sky-field, full of folk*, perchance.

*Piers Plowman by William Langland, c1380 - Lines 13-19.

*
Having discovered that George Orwell's wife is buried just a few hundred yards from where I am writing (in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne), and that Orwell himself seems to have intended to be buried here

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/george-orwell-intended-and-expected-to.html

..is a trivial micro-factoid in the scheme of things, but has had the effect of making me start thinking again about Orwell.

*

My generation was fed Orwell at school from our mid teens - some of the essays such as Shooting an Elephant and Boys' Weeklies; excerpts from the documentary books such as Down and Out.. and ...Wigan Pier; and the two late political novels Animal Farm and 1984.

That Orwell was mostly correct about things was not really argued, but assumed; on the basis that he seemed obviously correct to almost everybody; so far as the English were concerned, Orwell was simply expressing the national character better than we ourselves could have done.

Orwell was claimed both by the Left - on the basis that he was explicitly a socialist through most of his life; and he was claimed by the Right - on the basis that his two best known novels are anti-communist warnings against totalitarianism.

In sum: Orwell's influence was much as any writer reasonably could have hoped for. And his warnings about the dangers of Leftism and the operations of totalitarianism were as lucid, as explicit, and as forceful as any writer could have made them.

*

And yet Britain today is an 'Orwellian' society to a degree which would have seemed incredible even 25 years ago. The same applies to the USA, where Orwell was also revered.

In particular, the exact types of abuses, manipulations and distortions of language which Orwell spelled-out in fiery capital letters 100 feet high have come to pass; have become routine and unremarked - and they are wholly-successful, barely-noticed, stoutly-defended - and to point them out is regarded either as trivial nitpicking or evasive rhetoric.

The current manifestations of the sexual revolution, deploying the most crudely Orwellian appropriations and taboos of terminology, go further than even Orwell envisaged. The notion that sexual differences could so easily be subverted, and their evaluations so swiftly reversed; apparently at will and without any apparent limit would - I think - have gone beyond the possibilities Orwell could have realistically imagined.

*

(Indeed, it is characteristic of the Kafka-esque absurdity of modern Western life that a plain description of everyday reality - say in a state bureaucracy, the mass media or university - is simply disbelieved, it 'does not compute' and is rejected by the mind. And by this, nihilistic absurdity is safeguarded.)

*

I think Orwell would never have believed that people would accept, en masse, and so readily go along with (willingly embrace and enforce, indeed), the negative relabelling of normal biological reality, and he substitution of arbitrary and rapidly changing inverted norms: for Orwell, The Proles were sexually normal, like animals, and would continue so. The elites, whatever their personal preferences and practices, left them alone in this - presumably because sexuality was seen as a kind of bedrock.

And this leads to Orwell's fatal flaw - which was exactly sexuality. He was, like most radicals, an advocate and practitioner of promiscuous extra-marital sex - indeed he regarded this as the natural thing, and it would be wrong to suppress it. And he was essentially an agnostic/ watery Anglican; Orwell was not quite anti-Christian as such (although arguably anti-Catholic - on political grounds: he - mistakenly - regarded it as a species of totalitarianism); but I think he saw Christianity as being a personal matter, and one that ought not influence or constrain national laws and public morality.

*

Orwell was, of course, a patriot - strongly so; indeed his patriotism was a kind of bottom line for him, and he loathed those such as communists and national socialists who put other countries interests above their own; and especially those numerous Leftists in public life (at many levels, and going up to the top - including a King) who subverted Britain and covertly worked to promote Nazi or (mainly) Soviet policies.

At that time patriotism was a given for the mass of English people - although the upper class was full of traitors and fifth columnists, and the Scots, Welsh and (especially) Irish had developed an anti-English nationalism which allied itself with England's Enemies (the Scots and Welsh Nationalists were socialists/ communists, the Irish Republic allied with the Nazis).

But patriotism melted away and was aggressively suppressed in the decades after Orwell's death, and an attempt in 1993 by Prime Minister John Major to use Orwell's description of characteristic Englishness as a rallying point for national revival was mocked and ignored.

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist. 

*

In the end, Orwell's secular morality of 'decent behaviour' (decent, that is, except in the sexual realm - where it was pretty much a matter of grabbing as much as you could get away with); was revealed as spineless, sentimental, and having no basis - once Christianity had been stripped-out of British public (then private) life.

Orwell, like so many radicals of his time and ours, simply took for granted the rock-bottom which was provided by a Christian society - and he thought that we could pick and choose the bits we liked - the essential decency and gentleness and common sense - while leaving out the bits we didn't like: God, Jesus Christ, and the so-called 'puritanical' and anti-fun attitudes to lifestyle such as sex, alcohol, gambling and the like.

(In Wigan Pier, Orwell ridicules the then-strong puritanical strand of English socialism, implicitly including ascetic Nonconformists, as sandal-wearing, vegetarian cranks who put-off the common sense masses.)

*

But it turned out that the Christian thing was much more coherent, more interconnected and inter-dependent, and much deeper-rooted than Orwell and his contemporaries supposed. The act of digging so deep to uproot and thoroughly extirpate just that single aspect of sexual prohibitions was - in practice - to render ineffectual all decent social rules.

Indeed, the extirpation of Christian sexual morality was less like digging than quarrying - and when the job was done, the gentle, fertile beauties of the English landscape were reduced to sterile rubble.

*

(Orwell recognized the national significance of sub-replacement fertility - that it was an index of decadence and demoralization - but he did not foresee that exactly this, would be an inevitable consequence of his personal and ideological preferences for sexual 'freedom'. Many of us have made the same error - and continue to do so - in this, as in so many other ways, Orwell was a representative man.)

*

In the end England's greatest and most formidable foe of totalitarianism, and his legacy of lucid explanation and stern warning, was undone by one fatal flaw.

The sexual revolution, which Orwell supported, weakened then destroyed Christianity as a force in national life - destroyed that massive edifice of religion which was, it turned-out, as a matter of fact, the only thing that stood between England and totalitarianism.


*

The existence of human suffering is used, in modern culture, as a refutation of the Christian belief that God loves us - indeed it tends to be used as an argument against the existence of God, with the assumption that God is loving built-in.

"Yeah, but how can you explain Hitler, and cancer and stuff? God wouldn't allow that"

Like most modern arguments, this is used in such a context and with such an expectation that the Christian is supposed to rebut it in a sentence or maybe two...

The logic goes something like: If God was real, he would have made a better world than this - therefore God is not real.

(Interestingly, the alternative that God is real but not primarily loving - a view affirmed by considerably more than a billion people, doesn't seem to be considered - because mainstream modern Western culture is specifically anti-Christian; so the 'USP' of Christianity {that God is love} is simply taken for granted as characteristic of any God.)

How would I answer such a challenge - if given the luxury of somebody's attention for a few sentences? I would need to state how I regard God, and also the purpose of human life - when both of these are known (but not until then) there is a possibility of explaining the problem of pain.

1. God is the creator, and our loving Father. We can often understand things by this real-metaphor. In other words, we are children, immature but growing, trying to understand why our parents behave the way they do.

2. The purpose of life on earth is 'educational' - we each are growing towards greater divinity (to be more like God) in an environment that is meant to provide maturing, deepening, challenging experience.

3. Every person's specific situation and needs are unique - so there are no general answers to 'why?' something happens to some people - but only explanations of this happening to this person in such a time and place.

4. Therefore, we may be able to understand the reason for our own personal suffering - if we sufficiently understand God, ourselves and our own specific needs and those of people around us. But, given the incredible complexity of things, and the multitude of possibilities, the only imaginable way we could understand even this limited question is from a divine perspective - i.e. if God grants us a personal revelation to explain to us our situation, to explain why X happened to me.

5. And clearly - given the reality of human uniqueness - we can never know this detailed information for most of the seven billion people on the planet, and the billions more who lived in the past.

*

Also - in general - we need to take a step-back and recognize the nature of what is being asked when a Christian - and I mean a sincere Christian, not merely some person such as a bishop who is claiming to be a Christian - argues that suffering refutes the lovingness of God.

Such a Christian is in the position of a child saying that because bad stuff happens this means 'therefore' his parents do not love him. There is an equation being made between 'my happiness' and my parents love for me - specifically the assertion that if I am suffering, it is because my parents do not love me.

This, I think, is a sufficiently accurate summary of 'the problem of pain' argument in many situations. It is usually a childish and selfish argument - that is, an argument motivated by selfishness and childish in its refusal to acknowledge self-ignorance and immaturity in a context which involves an already-existing lack of belief in the goodness (or reality) of God.

Consider: A child may be, often is, in situations where his parents seem (from the perspective of that child) to be inflicting suffering for no reason - this is one of the great sadnesses of parenting.

For example, taking a child for a painful medical procedure. A Father may be holding the child still while the doctor does something which from the child's perspective is a form of torture. From the child's perspective, Daddy brought me to this horrible place and Daddy is holding me tight so that this nasty man can hurt me.

But, in a good family, this does not destroy, does not even challenge, the child's confidence (faith) in the absolute love of his parents.

The reality is that the Father is doing all this from love of his child - although there is no way that a young child can comprehend the situation.

In practice a child is very likely to be hurt and confused by the situation; but also in practice the little boy clings even more tightly to his Father - because that child knows that whatever happens (or seems to be happening), his Father loves him and wants the best for him.

So the answer to the problem of pain is very simple - simple enough for a young child to understand; and indeed simple Christians of past generations understood this without having to be told. The context is that we know that God is our loving Father, and therefore the more we suffer here and now, the more we want and need him; the more we ought to cling tight onto him.

The coming of Jesus Christ changed the nature of death.

More exactly, I believe that this happened at the point of his baptism by John; the time when Jesus became divine; when the divine spirit rested upon him and stayed with him.

From then; those who loved, trusted, had-faith-in, 'followed' Jesus (those who wanted to be resurrected and dwell in Heaven for eternity) would be resurrected.

So time is real, history is real; the nature of death is divided into before and after that moment. That moment introduced the new possibility after biological death; which was resurrection to eternal life.


Before Jesus, there was no resurrection. When Men died, the spirit was separated from the body. What then?

My understanding is that the body is what enables greater agency, greater freedom; our capacity to be an actor rather than acted-upon. A spirit without a body has a much lesser degree of agency; so when the body dies there is a loss of The Self.

We experience an analogous situation each time we sleep. Sleep itself represents two of the possibilities after death - when we live in the spirit.


Deep sleep is the loss of consciousness. We are alive but don't know it (or barely so); alive but unaware of anything. This is the nearest reality to the subjective perception of death as annihilation.

Genuine annihilation of an individual spirit is impossible since our primordial spirit had no beginning, is eternal, has no end - but self-awareness can be annihilated (which represents a return to our primordial state, before we became Children of God) - alive but unaware.

When this state of alive-but-unaware is pleasurable, blissful - then it is Nirvana; the state of being sought by Hindus and Buddhists. So I am suggesting that deep sleep is a temporary Nirvana.


Dreaming sleep is equivalent to Hades or Sheol; which are seen as conditions of 'delirious', or demented half-being; when men become witless ghosts or similar.

This is seen in the state of dreaming sleep insofar as we are in a passive state of being. Memory constantly slips away, our capacity for agency is feeble so that we 'go along with' whatever is happening.

Dreaming sleep is an experience of passivity, loss of reason and purpose. It is a vision of spirit life without incarnation.


I suggest that these states - Nirvana and Hades, corresponding to deep and dreaming sleep - were the possibilities of spirit life before Jesus.

A further possibility was reincarnation. The spirit could be re-housed in a new body.

Since the body, and its specific nature, affects the spirit - this meant the reincarnated spirit, reborn and leading another life, was 'a different person' - not the same person repeated.

An analogy would be a relative who shares a certain fundamental similarity, the same flavour, deep character - "He's Just Like his uncle John...".


After Jesus a further possibility was introduced, in addition to 'Christian resurrection' - and this was Paradise.

Paradise takes various forms - Valhalla, or the Muslim Paradise. Implicitly, Paradise is a state in which our-selves are retained and our agency; so paradise is a kind of resurrection.

But Paradise is not a resurrection to the presence of God and the participation in the work of creation that is Heaven. It is a place where one's favourite activities become possible, in principle eternally (and subject to the limits of that aspiration, and the constraints of mutual existence).

Paradise (in its variants) is, indeed, pretty much the lower or 'Telestial' Heaven as described in Mormon theology. It is pleasurable and enjoyable, but in Paradise men are not qualitatively different from how they are in this mortal life - there is no ascent to a higher, more conscious and creative and loving, form of life.

In sum; Paradise is essentially uncreative, passive ('contemplative', appreciating, consuming) a reversion to childhood or adolescence; to Original Participation. And I believe it is possible that some people in Heaven are actually experiencing Paradise - e.g. those who are resurrected as (in their essence) children, but who live (as children) with their families who include those who are participating with God in the work of creation.  


What about Hell? Well some will choose that, on the basis of how they choose in mortal life - maybe even a large majority of people in the modern West.

These are self-excluded from heaven, and self-excluded from resurrection; Hell is the exclusion of Love.

Such remain spirits in the condition of Sheol, but isolated by the perspective and priorities of those who choose Hell.

Their state seems terrible to me; and is based upon a primary (pride-full) dishonesty of denying that they are God's children living in God's creation... but Hell is what they get, having rejected all the above.

So, Jesus brought Hell, as well as resurrection in Heaven - because it is deliberate, conscious rejection of the world of God, Good, Creation and Love that makes Hell hellish.

Note added: Resurrection is the single most astonishing, incredible, mysterious thing about Christianity. That is my point. What that means is that resurrection is Not something that can be 'explained' in common-sensical, ordinary, easily intelligible, procedural terms as if it was a chemical manufacturing process. It is incredible. I am not At All surprised if people don't believe it. Nonetheless, resurrection is something near the core of what Jesus taught (and did). I think resurrection is probably a much more important fact of Christianity than commonly regarded. We should work from that, rather than try to make the incredibility go away.
 

There is one thing I’m going to personally reject, and that is the mistake of labeling promiscuity as somehow “freedom.” That that is a freedom. Fourth Nephi has a little scripture and it is right after what happens to the people there after Jesus Christ has visited the Americas and then ascended back into heaven. So this is Fourth Nephi 1:16. And it says:

And there were no envyings, no strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.

And as I studied that scripture, I started asking myself, what would it be like if there were no whoredoms? What would that society be like? So here’s my list:

• Teenage couples don’t get pregnant and have to get married to the wrong person.
• Lives don’t get warped and stalled by sexual abuse.
• There is no fear of rape or violence.
• There is great security on the streets, there’s no serial killers, there’s no kidnappings.
• There is no market for prostitutes.
• There is no sex trade or there is no sexual slavery.
• Spouses don’t have affairs or commit adultery.
• Marriages stay intact and children aren’t raised in the insecurity and divided loyalty of divorce.
• Cities don’t have seedy, creepy neighborhoods that are filled with adult theaters and deviant bookstores.
• There is no appetite for pornography – it doesn’t degrade the people who make it or who watch it. It doesn’t warp the sexual development of young people and rot the relationship between a husband and a wife.
• There are no children being raised by a generation of women and painfully wondering where there fathers are.
• All of the energy and the money that goes into all of those activities above the above, is available for something else.

How is that not more free and not more desirable for women, for men, for children, how is that not?

http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectives/fair-conferences/2014-fairmormon-conference/womans-church

*

The way to think about this list of bad things, is not to suppose that Christian morality would eliminate these specific bad things durng the foreseeable span of mortal life; but that Christian morality enables us to know that bad things really are bad - which is something that the modern West utterly lacks.

Our problem is not so much that a lot of bad things happen - but that we have lost the ability to discern good and evil: worse that the loss/ explusion of Christianity from public discourse makes it impssible to believe (or even say) that bad things are bad - and creates the most appalling moral nihilism.

Recently, near to where I live, a man was accidentally (so the court ruled) tortured to death by another man during the course of an extreme sado-masochistic sex session. I cannot bring myself to write the details of what happened - but if you think of the worst tortures you have ever read about that it was not far short. Meanwhile, the killer was sharing his ecstatic torture details with a group of like-minded persons via social media.

The killer claimed in court - with was what apparently an aggressive moral self-righteousness - that it was an innocent mistake, and he defended the right of adults to do whatever they wanted to each other in private so long as there was consent.

Legally, consent was here a problem, since the deceased had been dosed with massive amounts of a drug - but it was ruled that the victim, probably, implicitly consented to this. However, as well as being grossly intoxicated, the victim also had his mouth stuffed and lips stapled together - so he was not in a position to express any change of mind.

The principle on which the defense was based was that the killer had a moral and legal right to torture the victim to within an inch of death by the most horrific means he could devise - so long as there was consent, and so long as he did not actually cross that inch-line and actually kill him. And if, as happened, he did kill the other man, then this was just an unfortunate accident, something regretted all round, and not murder; because there was no intent to kill him but merely to inflict the greatest imaginable extreme of possible human suffering.

Implicitly, all this is both morally and legally permissible; indeed it is now treated as a vital human right; because (and this was mentioned in court) this is a sexual preference of a minority, which should be logically treated, and legally treated, as a personally sexual identity. And we all know how sacred sexual identities are to modernity since the sexual revolution. And that whatever you most want to do sexually just-is your sexual identity; the thwarting of which is to deny a primary human right.

In sum, it is not merely legally and permissible to torture another in the most 'extreme' (favoured word) fashion to within an inch of death for sexual pleasure - but this is a officially (albeit implicitly, at the moment) a positive expression of human rights expressed within a persecuted minority.
My point is that in the reported summary of the judge accepted this framing of the situation. The killer was convicted of manslaughter, but the judge accepted that if the death had not occurred, then there had been no wrongdoing.

The legal situation, as it stands, is that ultimate torture is a protected human right - and cannot be stopped so long as it is done for sexual reasons - unless it can be demonstrated that consent was lacking or imperfect.

If you knew for certain that regular extreme torture to within an inch of life sessions were happening in a neighboring house, or the room next door - you would be breaking the law if you intervened to stop it. After all, almost certainly the authorities know of many instances of such activity going on - and they don't stop it. They can't. It is not now officially regarded as something which should be stopped. It is a human right.

And this incredible (in the literal sense of the word) extremity of moral inversion - of relabelling evil as good - is not imagined for some future dystopia in some outlandish culture - but the law I live under, right now, in the place where I live.

How has this arisen? Because without religion there is no objective morality; and without objective morality we 'cannot say' that torturing another person to almost-death for pleasure is an evil thing as such - but only when it is done without their consent.

If then (and why not? - it could happen, it could happen next year) sexual torture becomes common, if it becomes normalized, if it becomes positively encouraged by government campaigns and taught in schools as a valid lifestyle option - then this is something we must (under dominant modernity) simply accept as the price of sexual freedom and identity.

This - here and now - is the extremity to which we have been brought by leftism and its major strategic weapon: the sexual revolution. But such is the nihilistic poverty of the secular West that we cannot (and do not) even object to the situation we are already in.

We merely, collectively, shrug and say (perhaps with hint of nostalgic regret, a twinge of residual disgust): Why Not?

It seems clear that we are all of us raised to have at least one, but usually many, Achilles' heels - weak points in our world view, through-which evil can enter and colonize; and turn us to its side in the spiritual war.  

2020 showed us a comprehensive failure of All human institutions, of All ideologies - the failure even to to recognize the obvious fact of a global, totalitarian, leftist-materialist - hence evil - coup.  

Everybody failed - but in many different ways. 

The various causes of their various failures are what I term their Achilles' heels. 

The collection of these Achilles' heels, over several centuries, could be termed Leftism - or simply the demonic strategy. 

Some early ones were pacifism, abolition (of slavery), and socialism. Nationalism came later. Since the sixties there have been feminism, antiracism, 'environmentalism' (now reduced to 'climate change'), multi-culti-anti-nativism, and the stages of the sexual revolution culminating in the gross lies of the trans-agenda. 

These are all provide examples of the way in in which adherence to a single false - partial, distorted, simplistic - principle or idea, can serve to be the entry point of evil - from which it expands to take-over a person's perspective. 

But 2020 also showed the failure in the West of the Christian churches: the Roman Catholic church, the Anglican churches and the Protestant including Evangelical churches, the Mormon church etc. - none of which recognized the reality of the Satanic coup; all of which explicitly embraced one or more of the coup's ideologies via is weaponized Litmus Test issues. 

What we saw in 2020, on a vast scale, was the failure of every mainstream and powerful metaphysics; due to one or many Achilles' heels. For instance; we have all seen the way in which a 'lifelong' 'committed' socialist, feminist, 'civil rights' activist or whatever, is led-by-the-nose into supporting gross and obvious evil. 

It is obvious why the secular ideologies all failed; but why did the major Christian churches all fail? 

Each for different reasons, perhaps. Each had built itself on some principle which 2020 revealed to be inadequate. Roman Catholics and Mormons relied on their leadership to tell them what was right and what to do - and when these leaders became assimilated to the coup ideology, then members were drawn with them. 

Protestants began with an incoherent dependence on 'scripture' - and (mostly via the generations of corruption of Bible 'scholarship' to secular modes of reasoning) scripture translations and 'historical' interpretation have become incrementally assimilated to the coup ideology. 

It seems that now 'the Bible says' and 'the leaders say' we all ought to live in accordance with the coup agenda in part or in whole: believe the birdemic propaganda, crave the peck, take the knee/ confess our racism, welcome mass colonization/ cultural annihilation by 'refugees', clamour for a worldwide anti-carbon economy - and embrace the new world order of omni-surveillance and micro-control necessary to impose all these and more.  

There has been 'no hiding place' among the institutions, nor among the major churches. No hiding place among the ideologies, the theologies, the systems...

Faced with so many lies, so much dishonesty, such a vast and relentless propaganda, so little courage and principle from an expedient-faithless populace... almost-all social institutions simultaneously capitulated all over the world. 

And apparently none have repented. (Individuals - yes; but not repentant institutions.)

My understanding is that, by the evil choices of many Men, the world has become as it is; yet God can turn even these End Times to Good. We are now, each of us, confronted by a world of evil institutions - including not just the actual churches, but the principles and practices of those churches - which have been 'turned' onto the side of Satan.  

Each Man must either choose assimilation into this obviously-evil world - supported (overall) by each of the world institutions; or else he is thrown back upon him-self; upon his own personal discernment and judgment - and his capacity to take the side of God and follow Jesus Christ. 

There is no program, nor formula; no checklist nor principle - because all programs and formulae/ checklists and principles have been corrupted and re-directed towards the devil's side.  

What we each do have is the intuition, the heart-thinking, of our divine self (or soul) as internal guidance; we have the revelation of the Holy Ghost as external guidance; and we have the motivation based on hope which comes from faith. 

What this means is that Life has become very simple! 

It seems like a paradox - when the world has reached such an incredible level of complexity and interlocking deception and evil-intent. But as the world has become very-obviously too complex to explain in materialist terms - it has become spiritually simplified to mere evil-intent (in its multifarious and proliferating expressions) 

To take the side of God, solidly and against all these pressure; we absolutely must recognize and repent those Achilles' heels in ourselves - because they are always present. 

Recognize (and repent) those precious-but-vulnerable points of 'central' doctrine or principle which have rendered All of us as individuals (as well as All institutions) vulnerable to colonization by evil.

These are not the central points of Christianity - and never really have been (although in past ages, when Men implicitly assumed and knew more of the divine and spiritual than now, they could without fatal harm be regarded as core and essential). 

The central essence of being-a-Christian is not to be made dependent on any worldly thing - including not depending on the validity on any particular church institution - but come to each of us directly and unmediated from God. 

After all, God is creator and continually create-ing; God is wholly Good - and is our Heavenly Father. And just like any ideal mortal father; God will never leave any single one of his children bereft of sufficient guidance for his salvation and theosis when God can (by his ongoing work of creation) reach and shape the lives of all of us - no matter how bad 'the world' becomes. 

It is faith in this simple fact that gives indomitable hope - and an antidote to fear, despair and all other evil snares. These times can teach us this vital Christian lesson; and more powerfully than any ever before.