@JD - I have not read this book, but observe that I used to try and do this pretty seriously; and that it nearly-always nowadays entails being a 'bad employee' in breach of multiple, sackable, regulations - several or many times per day.
How long this can be maintained is debateable. I had to reire (from ill health) before I needed to choose between being sacked and quitting from 'disgust'.
I suspect the only viable way to be employed longterm without harm to faith (in middle class jobs, anyway) is to live in a state of permanent repentance at the frequency and severity of the sins one commits in order to earn a living.
Perhaps it would be helpful to acknowledge one's own de facto slave status - on the basis that many great Christians have, from the beinning, been slaves; thus without much control over their actions, hence compelled to assert the primacy of thought.
31 May 2019 at 11:20
David said...
So it seems Good will triumph over evil , only in the next life, and only for some...
@David - I have to to regard 'triumph' as the wrong way to understand it. Good and evil are qualitatively different.
Or, the unit of 'triumph' is the individual soul - and each soul is different (from eternity), and it is a matter of how that soul chooses (to follow Jesus or otherwise).
Triumph should be translated as God's joy and our joy that someone we love has chosen to join the Heavenly family in the work of creation. The 'defeat' is when someone we love chooses otherwise, and is lost to us - modified by the fact that they got what they asked for and 'wanted'.
31 May 2019 at 14:57
Dave said...
Hopefully the System will collapse swiftly and completely, like Communism did, and do it while most of us are still alive and strong enough to help our loved ones survive.
Another possibility worries me. Like the Roman Empire, the System could collapse gradually, dysgenically, over centuries, until it's nothing but a bunch of illiterate warring tribes unrelated to the Empire's founders.
@Dave - I'd say both. There already has been about eight generations of dysgenic decline (especially for the upper classes) and a similar decline from Christianity to Leftism , but there will also be a sudden change.
1 June 2019 at 07:13
Assuming that this mortal life is an experience for learning what we need for eternity; there comes a point at which The System (which nowadays is a totalitarian global bureaucracy, mostly administered by docile servants and possessed slaves of demons) become net evil and must be allowed to destroy itself.
Creation is Good, and conversely evil is anti-creation. It is the Good within and around The System that enables it to accomplish anything, and when this Good is withdrawn The System will collapse.
Consider your own experience of working in your local branch of The System, within any branch of the single global bureaucracy = any institution, organisation or corporation of more than moderate size and power...
You will recognise that such groups function nowadays Only by those people who perform their function despite the institutional incentives. Those individuals who do exactly what they are 'supposed to do', function as almost-pure 'managerial' parasites; and an organisation that best fulfils its bureaucratic function is almost-wholly a-functional and actually-parasitic.
It is the Good people and those who (some of the time) do Good things, against the spirit and letter of what they are 'supposed to' do, who maintain the world in face of the mass of evil people and the evil that all Men do much of the time...
All that is necessary is for the Good people to stop doing Good, and everything will collapse; and since The System is ever-more orientated towards the prevention of Good and enforcement of evil - this point will inevitably arise so long as The System survives. As The System develops, the Good will simply become unable to do Good.
So, either The System will collapse soon because it implicitly seeks its own collapse; or else The System will collapse later, when it has sufficiently suppressed the remaining Good.
Thus evil is self-limiting, by its nature. Obviously.
Of course, the collapse of The System will not - of itself - do any Good at all; but would only do Good if the experiences led to spiritual learning.
The collapse of The System would lead to the deaths of billions of people, but of itself that is a neutral fact - since everybody will die sooner or later. The question is what happens to these people after they die; and that is mostly a matter of what these people want... Their inner motivations, their spiritual (or otherwise) aspirations - whether they are motivated by (real, objective) Love or by (subjective, evanescent) pleasure...
Nothing (I believe) is more important than a person's basic assumptions concerning the nature of reality, of Life, of his place in the scheme of things and what he ultimately wants. Is this world one with prupose and of meaning? Is there a niche for each individual within purpose and meaning? What is the role of freedom, and what its possible aim?
It would potentially be of incalculable value if such matters could become the subject of thinking.
"When The System has become net evil - it must end"
6 Comments -
"This 'system' possessing no vision of an end other than its own perpetuation, must eventually bring about its own destruction."
"God and Work" by Brian Keeble
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6623824-god-and-work
31 May 2019 at 08:26
@JD - I have not read this book, but observe that I used to try and do this pretty seriously; and that it nearly-always nowadays entails being a 'bad employee' in breach of multiple, sackable, regulations - several or many times per day.
How long this can be maintained is debateable. I had to reire (from ill health) before I needed to choose between being sacked and quitting from 'disgust'.
I suspect the only viable way to be employed longterm without harm to faith (in middle class jobs, anyway) is to live in a state of permanent repentance at the frequency and severity of the sins one commits in order to earn a living.
Perhaps it would be helpful to acknowledge one's own de facto slave status - on the basis that many great Christians have, from the beinning, been slaves; thus without much control over their actions, hence compelled to assert the primacy of thought.
31 May 2019 at 11:20
So it seems Good will triumph over evil , only in the next life, and only for some...
31 May 2019 at 14:14
@David - I have to to regard 'triumph' as the wrong way to understand it. Good and evil are qualitatively different.
Or, the unit of 'triumph' is the individual soul - and each soul is different (from eternity), and it is a matter of how that soul chooses (to follow Jesus or otherwise).
Triumph should be translated as God's joy and our joy that someone we love has chosen to join the Heavenly family in the work of creation. The 'defeat' is when someone we love chooses otherwise, and is lost to us - modified by the fact that they got what they asked for and 'wanted'.
31 May 2019 at 14:57
Hopefully the System will collapse swiftly and completely, like Communism did, and do it while most of us are still alive and strong enough to help our loved ones survive.
Another possibility worries me. Like the Roman Empire, the System could collapse gradually, dysgenically, over centuries, until it's nothing but a bunch of illiterate warring tribes unrelated to the Empire's founders.
31 May 2019 at 23:16
@Dave - I'd say both. There already has been about eight generations of dysgenic decline (especially for the upper classes) and a similar decline from Christianity to Leftism , but there will also be a sudden change.
1 June 2019 at 07:13