Sorry for the interruption in the regularly scheduled programming of this station.  Please believe me that indolence is not to blame.  But rather, due to the endless downpour of winter fury we are experiencing here, the proprietor of this blog has been constrained by other binding duties commensurate to his role as Suburban Keeper of the Yard and Cars.  Apparently, “Shoveling Your Ass Off” was at the bottom of the list of job requirements, and as such, was missed during the marital interview processes.  If it had been noticed, the marriage would have continued, but I would be writing this post to you from the comfort of a one-bedroom inner city apartment with fuck-all for a yard, sidewalk, or driveway.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled series on Omnipotence and Omnipresence, where we will further examine these two irrational prongs of the Reformed pitchfork.

On a side note:  Please stay tuned for part four of this series, coming soon, where we will consider the logical fallacy and impossible “truth” of the heady idea of “ex nihilo”.

Oooooh and aaaaaaaah, you are supposed to gasp.  The neo-Reformed gestapo loves to appeal to Latin in an effort to impress.  But fear not, for ex nihilo, though frilly in name, is the exact same level of bullshit we have come to know and love from the Reformed slave traders.  They have effectively declared that “nothing” is “something”.  So, obviously this is just another manner–Latin, yay!–in which they punt ALL of their interpretive premises into the great cosmic abyss of God’s “mystery”.

Sigh.

It’s all a mystery, I tell you.  Hang your brain up on the coat rack when you walk into your shiny new neo-Calvinist local church.  You know, its the big one down town, with all the concrete and glass, full of sharp and inviting angles, ostentatious and garish in all of its hyper-spiritual “humility”, advertising that you visitors “come as you are”, and that you don’t have to tithe on your first Sunday because that is a “privilege” of the church members.

I used to love that word.  Privilege.  Man, these erudite propagandists have a way with words, don’t they?  It is such a huge privilege to give your money to people who preach a doctrine which demands that they cannot and shall not POSSIBLY, at any time, really appreciate the amount of time and effort and pain it takes to procure a paycheck, because the doctrine?  A doctrine that teaches people that their  hard-earned money is all of God’s grace.  Which is merely code for:  you didn’t really earn it and don’t deserve it.

Yeah, tell that to the guy who works the roads for fifty hours a week and has a permanent stoop from lifting seven tons of dirt a day with a shovel; tell that to the sixty year old lady who works the register and is on her feet eight hours a day and has calluses on her hands and feet and scarcely minimum wage to show for it.  Tell that to the father of three who runs a business and has to deal with everyone from union reps to workers comp lawyers for 100 hours a week, all while sustaining himself on coffee, Prilosec, blood pressure medication, and Zoloft.  Oh my…thanks Pastor! You’ve really got your finger on the pulse of humanity’s worth, don’t you?!  Man, if working yourself to death to afford a tithe the amount of roughly what a house payment costs is how Christians define God’s “grace”, then I think we need a new translation of the Bible, like, yesterday.

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Besides the critical service they provide to the proprietors of spiritual tyranny (and coming soon to an elected office near you, CIVIL tyranny, which is sure to follow if any of these notoriously “godly” men win office), the notions of omnipotence and omniscience are, as mentioned, purely euphemisms for God-qua-determinism, which is nothing more than a gnostic presumption stemming entirely from NON-Jewish (and thus, non-Christian…remember, Christ was 100% Jewish, and the roots of his philosophy are entirely OT, not Greek Platonist) metaphysical and epistemological foundations.

Omniscience and omnipotence are utterly and absolutely determinist proxies; meaning that proffering them automatically implies a totally irrelevant human epistemology which is rooted in the quantification and qualification of entirely vacuous human metaphysics.  What this means is, for all the reasons I have heretofore expressed, that if we declare God is indeed omnipotent and omniscient, then we automatically declare our inability to exist as distinct-from-God and therefore self-aware agents (because if there is no SELF, and there isn’t in neo-Calvinist theology (by the way, I have a post on a comment from self-described “black coffee” Calvinist, Doug Wilson, who says that Christians are not “autonomous”)…so yes, there isn’t any SELF in neo-Calvinist theology and so humanity cannot be self-aware, by definition).  And if you follow the logical rabbit trail down to the edge of all reason, which terminates at the edge of reality, these notions of omnipotence and omnipresence must concede the idea that man then cannot possibly define God, because man is nothing more than an extension of God’s all-determining power.  In other words, if man is not a distinct agent, then he is not able to make a distinction between himself and God, which means man is merely a functional extension of God.  Man then cannot know himself, by definition, because there is NO autonomous SELF to man.  And if man cannot define himself, because there is no SELF, then how can man know God?

The answer is: he cannot.

So the massive irony of the determinist notions of omnipotence and omniscience is that if we concede them then we concede that man cannot possibly be in a position–that is, he cannot EXIST–to declare God omnipotent and omniscient in the first place. 

It is not hard to understand that if you cannot define your SELF as existing then there is literally no YOU to be aware of anything NOT you, which obviously must include God.  There is no such thing as NOT you because YOU are, in Reformed theology, always an extension of an absolute determining force.  The force being what?  The force is God, Himself, as the notions of omniscience and omnipotence completely attest to.   And then from this, if you care to weave your way delicately through the funhouse of Reformed interpretive premises (if not, I am happy to do it for you), you will notice that God’s “absolute” and all-“sovereign” nature–which is nothing more than all-determining–is somehow parsed into separate and mutually exclusive forces of depravity and grace.  The “unsaved” person is a direct function of God as absolute all-determining depravity (read “evil”), and the “saved” is a direct function of God as absolute, all-determining “grace” (read, “good”).  So God is somehow both the determining absolutes of depravity and grace, salvation and damnation.  God is a singular absolute of good and evil; even though this is entirely impossible as these two ideas are both completely autonomous and entirely exclusive of one another.  In short, God is a duality of two mutually exclusive conceptual abstractions.  Things which are not actual, IDEAS, which are what man uses to organize his environment (i.e. good, evil, truth, falsehood), become integrated incarnate into the metaphysical AND physical singularity of GOD.

And this is the utter root of Reformed theology.

It is impractical, impossible, irrational, and worst of all, it is evil.  It denies the very material reality of God, and separates Him from His Creation, and in doing so declares neither God nor Creation as actual.  God is not longer the Creator, and man is no longer His created.

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Remember the golden child of all of Argo’s Universal Truths?  It is this:  Whatever is a direct function of an absolute IS the absolute.  So if you are a direct function of God, because God IS determinism, then you are God.  And really…ultimately if determinism (e.g. “Sovereign Grace”) is true, then God and man are BOTH extensions of Determinism itself.  There can be no distinction of ANY kind apart from purely abstract conceptual notions.

And this is why the ideas of Omnipotence and Omniscience, which explicitly declare that God is able to be what He is NOT–meaning, God is able to be His Creation, for this is the VERY definition of these terms according the Reformed theological point of view–always lead to human destruction.  For if man does not possess a self-aware BEING, an individual and autonomous SELF, then man is nothing more than an animal which must be forceably compelled to the objective of God’s Will…for man’s will is a moot point (and it IS in Reformed theology; what YOU want is irrelevant, for there is NO exchange of value between you and God because you are not YOU).  Thus, it falls to the agents of the Primary Consciousness–the Pastors, Priests, Philosopher Kings, Shamans and Witch Doctors, Officiators and Divine Proxies–to lead humanity as God in the Stead.  And this makes violence and fear the only logical tools to which these despots appeal in service to their divine mandate to “lead” God’s “people”.  Indeed, this vile polity must demand violence and human oppression/subjugation as the the sole arbiter of God’s will.  If man doesn’t really exist as a rational animal, which is merely to say that man does not exist at all as SELF, then ALL of man’s circumstances and his position, no matter how brutal or destructive or bloody, are ultimately in service to God’s perfect Will.  Man, regardless of what he endures, is always acting in service to God’s will; for man is determined to, and all that happens to him is determined…according to the Divine Will, from which man directly extends.  So no matter how many men, women and children are slaughtered, imprisoned, raped, or psychologically terrorized/victimized, it is all “good”, ultimately.  Because things only happen one way:  the way the Determinist (Calvinist/Reformed) God wants them to.

Okay…I have to break. I will continue this post in a bit.

Stay tuned!