The Cancel Culture's Pathodicy
Those pathodicies have fully metastasized in large part because the Trump resistance movement has found some semblance of a way to derail his re-election chances by destroying the economy through a mass media cyberbullying campaign of incessantly pounding coronavirus and racialist hysteria.
Recently I'd been posting some thoughts about this "cancel culture" and how it has become virtually intolerable with the news that a top editor at The New York Times resigned because of its effects.
But I have to add a post to emphasize something that is never mentioned, if I may. That is simply
What precisely is the Kingdom response to all of this?
First of all it requires a deep insightful spiritual understanding of the contrast between the World and the Kingdom. And this involves how much fellowship are you having with Christ and his followers. Are you regularly reading His words? Are you prayerfully communing with the saints? Are you getting in deep with knowing how the World operates so you may more proficiently minister mercy and charity and salvation to lost souls?
Put simply, World System operatives have the job of ratcheting up the culture war, and man oh man is the culture war going full-blast right now. It isn't just the destabilizing policies that are actually being implemented because of the browbeating public officials must take for not being socialist sodomist racialist enough. It is just as much eliciting the vicious responses to those things from those who hate them. Complaining in every web forum you can about how much you loathe socialism and reject being called a racist for not complying? Leftists love you! World Ops love you! The louder the screeching the better!
It is very principled to respond forcefully and articulately to leftist bad ideas, that itself is not a bad thing at all. But if your god Freedom of Speech is all you've got, you will be utterly laid waste.
Freedom of speech is a very good thing, sure, but it is a flimsy substitute for what truth actually is.
It can't replace what God has done, is doing, and will do.
It is a difficult truth, but God is allowing this culture war conflagration to happen because people want it to happen. The leftist factions love the attention and intoxication of the crusade. The right-wing factions love to get in deep zealously championing capitalism and the Constitution and Americanist red white & blue liberty. It is just as addictive. It is all great fun.
As they say, it is all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
What is the Kingdom dweller to do?
Here's my thought. I always ask a member of either faction, these two magical words. Two wonderful splendid phenomenally powerful words.
Then what?
What happens when you get x, y, or z? I like a good fight, I do, but I must realize, really, what will happen once you've crushed your opponent underneath your massive earthenworks of ideological compulsions?
The leftist may say "We'll get complete justice for all the oppressed!"
Then what?
The right-winger may say "We may now earn a living and enjoy our lives in peace!"
Still: Then what?
One of the very bad ideas that is ravaging our country right now is the decision being made by hundreds of school districts across the country to keep school campuses closed for the fall. This is a bad idea because the science does say so much about this coronavirus thing and what it really is, and those things actually demonstrate the decisions made in response to it are not fully justified.
As a teacher I have seen several statements from these districts about what they are doing and why. I've discovered something very telling in just about every single one of them: They are all about the teachers and administrators at the schools and the anxieties they perceive all around, and very little about the children, their education, and the coronavirus itself.
Can you see the distinction? The anxieties are merely caused by the unjustified hysteria, and that is the thing truly driving these bad-idea decisions. There is a lot of "We want your children to be safe" talk, which is saying nothing about what the parents know and the children want but everything about what the administrators have been led to believe and how the administrators want the parents to think about them.
Where is the courage? Where is the conviction? All we see are milquetoast people scurrying away from doing the hard work of confronting a very manageable disease and coordinating a program of mitigating its effects so our children will be back in the classroom where they belong.
And the culture war continues unabated.
Again, it is the very predictable eventuality of a nation given over to the precepts of Cain's legacy. God made it happen, as you can see back in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Lots of people say they believe in God and say they are doing His things when they are only doing things the way the World tells them to do things they think they're doing for God. God had already afforded them the freedom to do whatever they want outside of His Kingdom, that's their choice.
But it will be brutal.
This cancel culture war is brutal.
Once again. Just to conclude. Sorry for being redundant, but it is worth repeating. When you get your culture war victory for whatever you think you are going to get from it, then what? When you get that, then what? What does any of that mean unless you are authentically loving another with Christ's love, and you are also allowing the World to do its thing -- leaving it be, not rebelling or railing or remonstrating against its divinely authorized duties for those who simply want to have nothing to do with Christ?I'm not saying you aren't working to do these Kingdom things, I'm not trying to impugn anyone who is genuinely doing God's work -- that's not my call, I know that. But what does a victory in Christ's name mean? Each of us has our own pathodicies in our own idiosyncratic ways. The World's is for an individual to be trained well in doing whatever it is they do because it gratifies him or herself. Ultimately they're actually doing it for Cain's agents whoever they are, there are many of them, all thoroughly enjoying basting over the spit anyone who enthusiastically signs up for duty or ferociously charges them with a sword. Both are great for fine dining.
The Kingdom's is to do it for someone because you love him or her no matter what happens to you. Then you have your own life back with its wonder, joy, beauty, and exhilaration. It is almost that simple.
Are you an other-sacrificer, like Cain was, or a self-sacrificer like Christ is? The former is not necessarily a bad thing, you may be full of pithy ideas for memes and tweets about how to utilize the best human sacrifice for the great crusade in the service of our hifalutin government celebrity policy-shover showing up on television a lot to inspire everyone in forming that delightful utopian paradise. Yeah!
Or do you love with His love even with the fires of Hell wafting up, being stoked, lapping at your back?
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The first image has been in my file for some time. The second is by Steve Debenport at Getty Images, from the learnreligions.com site. Thank you.
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