Monthly Archives: April 2022

Questions Which Can Have No Answer…:Why benevolent government is impossible (part two)

forced compliance, government, individualism vs collectivism, law, morality, Uncategorized, ,

Explaining how the inherent contradictions of the questions I listed in part one relate specifically to government is the purpose of the remainder of the posts in this series. Today’s post will examine question one.

1. How shall we enslave them to set them free?

A wise man with whom I used to regularly associate, John Immel, once said that government is authority and authority is force—his point being that coercion is not merely a characteristic of the State, but is in fact the state’s most fundamental characteristic, and likely the only truly relevant one. Absent force there is literally nothing about the State which has any meaning whatsoever. I agree with this completely, and the only thing I would add to John’s aphorism concerns the Law. I might put it this way: The Law is government, and government is authority, and authority is force. Meaning that once Law is declared or implied as the guiding societal principle then government is established to compel obedience…because law absent forced compliance is not law, but suggestion. Government is the physical incarnation of the Law’s right, or Authority, to compel obedience. No citizen gets decide for himself whether he shall obey or not, for if this were the case then the law would, again, not actually be law, but suggestion.

This goes to the heart of why I have for the last several years assiduously asserted that legality is a fundamentally distinct ethic than that of morality, and that, in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. To build a society rooted in the ethic of legality—that men’s behaviors shall be bound and constrained by law—is to ensure that that society is not and never shall be a moral one.

Morality is an ethic that necessitates that men must will and choose; legality is an ethic which declares that choice and will are fundamentally irrelevant…men will do what the law demands or they will be disabled or destroyed. Period. Legality deals in punishment; morality in consequence…and the difference between them is not in the least bit subtle. Consequence is earned; punishment is meted out. You cannot earn a punishment; you cannot be dictated a consequence. The law cannot acknowledge that you earned your punishment precisely because it does not acknowledge the legitimacy of your will and choice. You will obey or else; what you want, what you will, and thus to what end you shall exercise your choice, is utterly meaningless to the law. The law dictates your behavior, and you will act. You have no choice in the matter. Law is not cooperative. “Cooperative law” is a contradiction in terms. You don’t earn. You act, or you are in some sense or literally erased from society. You act as the law demands or you don’t exist. There is nothing for you to earn. The law IS, you act. That’s all. There is no “consequence”, nothing is earned; nothing is given to you or happens to you because you don’t have any real individual autonomy under law.

The law says how you must or must not behave, period. Further, any behaviors not specified by the law are still obliged to it, for the entire context of all behavior is framed by the law. If the law can demand your compliance in one behavior, it can demand it in all of your behaviors. At the root of all your relevant actions is your volitional Self, and this Self is utterly singular. Thus, to claim to own just one of your behaviors is a claim to the ownership of all of YOU, entirely. The law implies that at any point it may demand any behavior from you, full stop. The law is the basis for the authority over the race of men by those who are called, elected, installed, etc. to enforce it.

Let’s look at the following example:

Person A attempts to rob person B; person B shoots person A as person be B defends his property.

Now, both Morality and Legality will value the act of robbery and the act of self defense according to a given standard, and the standard is simply that which the action can be said to ultimately serve. This is where the two ethical systems diverge, never to be reconciled—where their utter incompatibility is illustrated. With morality, the standard is the individual, and thus is likewise that which must be preserved in order that the individual may have actual, rational, objective, meaningful existence. In other words, the moral standard is that which must be preserved in order for the very existence of the individual to be possible on both the physical and metaphysical levels. The moral standard then is Self, and, by extension, that by which the Self is made manifest in reality: life (being alive in the world), liberty (being consciously and willfully active in the world), and property (the means by which being alive and being active can efficaciously occur). In short, the individual is the moral standard, which necessarily makes choice an integral component of ethics, as choice and will are ineluctably integral to the individual. We can therefore value the action of defending one’s property as being a moral action because it is in service to the individual; and the consequence of being shot in the attempt to rob another person as being a moral consequence.

Legality offers us a different interpretation of the scenario entirely. The Law, as I have explained, rejects choice and will as having any ethical meaning whatsoever. The law is about obedience, and obedience is by definition the rejection of choice. “Choose to obey” is a contradiction in terms, as one cannot choose to have no choice. One can choose to cooperate, but not choose to obey. Slaves obey, free men cooperate. And no sane person would ever equate slavery and choice, because “freedom” and “slavery” are opposites. To say one is the other is, to put it mildly, complete nonsense.

So what is the ethical standard according to legality? Well, the ethical, or legal. standard is not the law, precisely, it is fundamentally the Collective Ideal, incarnate via the government (Ruling Class) and which forms the metaphysical basis for legal ethics, but for any truly meaningful purposes we can presume that the Law itself is the standard. We really don’t need to get bogged down in metaphysics to make the point here.

What is the point, then, you ask?

The point is that the action of defending one’s property and the action of getting shot whilst attempted to rob that person of their property are going to be valued according to the degree to which they are in compliance with the Law. The law is the legal standard. If this seems circular, or redundant, well, that’s because it is. The law is, I submit, a wholly irrational ethic…untenable because it’s at root perfectly senseless.

At any rate the law is the legal standard, meaning that if the law says that one must not rob, then the act of robbery shall be unethical…”illegal” is to legal ethics as “immoral” is to moral ethics. Similarly if the law says that one may, or must, shoot someone trying to rob them then the act of shooting the robber shall be deemed ethical. The act of getting shot whilst trying to rob another is thus likewise deemed ethical.

Notice that I did not make getting shot a consequence of the attempted robbery…there is the act of shooting and the act of getting shot. Legally speaking, there is no such thing as consequence. No two actions are necessarily ethically connected in this regard. There is no action-reaction, or choice-consequence, only action-action. There is no necessary ethical value which can be logically drawn from any given behavior to any reciprocal behavior.

Let me try to clarify this point.

The law may declare it unethical (illegal) to rob someone, and likewise declare that one may not defend his property. The law may declare that the act of defending private property (there is no such thing under law, by the way, but that’s besides the point) is the sole purview of the State, for example…the police we could say, and that while it is illegal to rob it is also illegal to defend one’s property. There is no contradiction here…the law demands what you shall do in service to the law, and if the law decides that it is in service to the law for you to both not be robbed and also to not defend your property then that’s what shall be demanded of you. The law defines the context for your behavior and thus your existence, and whatever it declares you must do you will do. If those things seem contradictory or incongruent to you…well, what is that to the law? The law doesn’t care what you want, it doesn’t give you a choice, and thus it doesn’t care what you think. It rejects your consciousness as having any legitimacy at all, so what things seem to you with respect to the law is utterly beside the point.

On the other hand, morality is not like this at all. In morality, it not only is possible but necessary that there be ethical value shared in actions which are reciprocal to other actions. Morality accepts as axiomatic cause and effect, choice and consequence, action and reaction, and this is because morality implies will and choice as necessary to human existence, and thus it understands that there are natural outcomes of behavior which are driven by choice, and that those outcomes are thus necessarily tied in value to one’s behavior. If it is considered to be of value that a man shall own property then it must, morally speaking, be of value that man shall defend his property from theft, which means that if a man must shoot the robber in order to defend his property then getting shot is a moral consequence of attempting robbery.

Now, I certainly understand the moral question of whether or not one should use deadly force in the prevention of the theft of some inexpensive thing, like a pencil or marble, for example…but that actually furthers to illustrate my point. The reason we can have ethical conversations like this is because of morality; such questions are not a remonstrance of it. It is because morality fundamentally values the individual that we can ask questions about things like whether it is a good thing or not to shoot a person who is trying to steal a pencil. With the law, the answers to such questions are simply dictated to you and I. If the law declares that yes, you must shoot, or are allowed to shoot, one who is attempting to rob you of your pencil, then that’s settled. The law says it, you obey. It’s not for you to ask questions…and don’t think. It’s not for you to think.

What has all of this to do with the question, “How shall we enslave them to set them free”?

Well, it may not be entirely intuitive, but it’s not complicated to see the error implicit in the idea of the “benevolent State” as it applies to the rule of law…and I submit that law is implicit, if not explicit, in a slave-mater relationship. The master declares what behavior the slave must perform…this is the law for the slave. The slave obeys. It’s no more complicated than that…the only real difference is that in the state-citizen relationship, with our “free” and “democratic”, and “representative” government, with the smokescreens of “elections” and “constitutional rights”—the U.S. Constitution being the prototypical blueprint for the “benevolent state”—there are many masters and many millions of slaves.

Within the “benevolent state”, like every other state, there are rulers and there are the ruled, and this authority-submission dynamic is the very essence of the most basic forms of slavery. The benevolent state is nothing more, unfortunately, than a master who demands compliance from his chattel. The relationship is rooted in law…behavior is dictated, and obedience, not choice, is the only value the citizen brings to his government.

I understand that this is not a popular idea anywhere, not even in politically conservative or even libertarian circles, which stop short of declaring the state entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy. My perspective that it is entirely bereft of morality and legitimacy is said to be naive, oversimplified, myopic, purely ideological. I wish that were true…honestly I do. Unfortunately, a cursory look around the turgid nation where I reside, the U.S.A., reveals the objective reality, which is this: that what was once arguably the free-est nation on earth, the rights of the individual codified in its most fundamental of governing documents and heavily informed by individual-empowering enlightenment philosophy, has dissolved into nothing more than a pseudo-tyrannical, bloated, perpetually indebted, foolhardy, war-mongering peddler and exporter of neo-Marxist racist dogma which has decided that the apogee of virtue and virtue’s only meaningful objective is “social justice”, and that “social justice” is nothing more than at best doing to innocent white people the very same thing which was done to innocent black and brown people, which is about as lazy and stupid and hypocritical as is possible, and is literally less effective at creating a just society than doing absolutely nothing at all. Yet here we are. We fought a revolution over stamps and tea, but 30 trillion in debt, exploding inflation, World War Three, disintegrated borders, state-compelled “vaccinations” with experimental drugs, perpetually subsidized unemployment, government-sanctioned riots, and abortion rates of up to 70% in certain communities…well, hey, nothing one more election can’t fix. Give Trump four more we’ll be positively drunk on freedom.

The idea of the benevolent state and the rule of law is the idea that no one is above the law. Sounds good. We all cooperate together under law for freedom’s sake. No slave; no master. The government is a mere steward of that law which is established to enfranchise men to act out their natural rights. Law protects and promotes freedom…without it we are at the mercy of the whims of evil men.

Sounds good. However, it’s all just platitude. The hard, gun-shaped truth is that law is nothing without an authority to enforce it. That authority is the government, and the government which must enforce the law in order that the law can have any relevance and meaning whatsoever cannot simultaneously be obligated to that law. It is simply a contradiction and cannot work…which is precisely why it doesn’t. The reason the United States has dissolved into a black hole of corruption, greed, cognitive dissonance, and totalitarian fantasy is because of the fundamental philosophical premises which underwrite it, not because we simply don’t have the ‘“right people” in power. “If the slaves just had a different master they’d no longer be slaves” is a ridiculous claim, yet we continue to think that if we just elect the right men and women to political office we can turn the ship around and return to the halcyon days of beautiful individual freedom. No we cannot, because freedom does not and cannot proceed from the foundational documents which inform this nation. At root these documents speak to only two truly relevant things, and only one if we consider them mutually inclusive of one another: A government shall be established, and there shall be law. This demands, inevitably, that no matter how benevolent the intentions of the Founding Fathers, the nation will inevitably find its way to totalitarianism and collapse, just as we have seen time and time again in virtually all nations and all governments throughout history in all the world.

You cannot and will not free men by enslaving them…and government means slavery. Period. Benevolent or not. Benevolent government may be a benevolent master, which is preferable to a hateful master, surely, but a benevolent master is still a master, nonetheless; and you are still a slave; and just you wait and see how long your master remains benevolent once you decide that you no longer want to be a slave.

END

Questions Which Can Have No Answer are Not Actually Questions: Why benevolent government is impossible (and the lie of “free democratic elections”, and touching upon Is-Ought), part 1

Authority, government, individualism vs collectivism, tyranny, Uncategorized, ,

The ruling, or political class, in order to establish and preside over a benevolent State must answer some questions first. As you will readily deduce, these are questions for which answers are impossible, because the nature of the questions precludes them. Thus, they are not real questions. And yet, they must be answered in order for the government to be benevolent…hence the unsolvable problem, as it were.

Here we shall define “benevolent” as that which promotes, nurtures, and defends individual life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, the codification of which can be most readily seen in the United States Bill of Rights, I submit. However, if you don’t accept this definition of “benevolent”, then I presume you have another frame of reference for moral value other than that of the individual. That would be a hard thing to justify as you’d necessarily be advocating for a collective moral frame of reference (i.e the Greater, or Common, Good), as opposed to an individual one, because if not an individual moral frame of reference then your only alternative is a collective one. Yet you’d necessarily be advocating this collective moral frame of reference from your individual existential frame of reference.

See the contradiction?

The problem is that you’d be splitting up knowledge and value into two completely different, and further, mutually exclusive, frames of reference. The individual has knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that you are, as an individual, making a truth claim (i.e. collective moral value), but only the collective is able to make value judgements.

Here is the error: Without value judgements, the individual cannot actually apply his knowledge…but un-applicable knowledge is not knowledge. For example, you cannot know that an apple is different from a rock unless you, as an individual, which is what you are, know what you shall (not can, nor must, nor may, nor should) do with them. To know that if you are hungry you shall eat the apple and not the rock is a value judgment. Meaning that if you only know the definition of “apple” and “rock” but have no purpose for apple and rock at any given moment as it applies to you (i.e. from your own individual existential frame of reference), then the definition becomes irrelevant. An irrelevant definition is a meaningless definition; a meaningless definition is a contradiction in terms. To say that you know something (e.g. that morality is collective, not individual) but not how to value it (e.g. that we shall thus organize a government which serves the Common Good) means that you cannot actually know it. To know something but not what to do with the knowledge means that you don’t actually know it. Knowledge without value is knowledge without purpose is knowledge without relevance is knowledge without meaning is meaningless knowledge…which is a contradiction in term.

Those of you familiar with the Is-Ought problem of morality, as expressed by David Hume, I think it was, will see how the inexorable relationship between knowledge and value makes this quite a problem for the Is-Ought problem. In other words, there is no real Is-Ought problem unless you presume that one can posses knowledge but not value…or, as it is often put, real knowledge is always objective but value is always subjective. This just a fancy way of saying that only knowledge actually exists. You know that the apple is an apple and a rock is a rock, but not how to apply that knowledge in a way that validates it as being actually knowledge (i.e. Truth). Or, in other words, in a way that validates that the knowledge is actually relevant, and thus meaningful, and thus actually knowledge, as “meaningless knowledge” is again a contradiction in terms. “Meaningless knowledge” is the same as “meaningless definitions”, and that? Doesn’t’ make sense. In other words, the Is-Ought problem isn’t a problem unless you A.) confuse “shall” with “should” or “ought”, and B.) erroneously presume that knowledge (or Truth) and value (or Ethic) are mutually exclusive. As they are not, but are in fact corollary, there is no problem.

The Is-Ought dilemma is just a proxy for the determinist assertion that consciousness doesn’t exist. That the willful application of truth is utterly subjective, because it’s rooted in value judgements—in “shoulds”, or “oughts”—which are mutually exclusive of objective Truth—the “is”…that, say, the rock is a rock—and therefore individual consciousness, which is the root of utterly subjective value judgements, is a lie. In other words, there is perception without real awareness…we are but biological computers mathematically programmed by evolution, natural law, etc. etc….but more on that peculiar brand of mysticism at a later date.

By the by, I plan on doing a post on dismantling the imaginary Is-Ought dilemma in an upcoming post…I did a few posts on the subject a while back, but they were clumsy and confusing, so I deleted them. I have since come up with what I think are much better arguments and much clearer ways of presenting those arguments.

At any rate, if. you define “benevolence” with respect to government as something other than that which promotes, nurtures, and protects the life, liberty, property, and happiness of the individual, you’re quite mistaken.

So here are the questions the ruling class, or would-be ruling class, must answer in order to to establish a benevolent State (NOTE: “Them” refers to the citizens.)

1. How shall we enslave them to set them free?

2. How shall we rob them to protect their private property?

3. How shall we torment them to comfort them?

4. How shall we make them sick in order to keep them well?

5. How shall we coerce them to cooperate with them?

6. How shall we hate them to love them?

7. How shall we deny them to affirm them?

8. How shall we murder them to save them?

These questions are the impossible burden of the “benevolent” State. As they cannot be answered, because they are meaningless due to their inherent contradiction, any attempt to implement such a State inevitably dissolves into rank tyranny, despite any benign intentions. We are of course, in the West, witnessing this in stark, shocking real time reality. The “freest” nation in history, the U.S., has dissolved into an object, mostly Huxlian, totalitarian financial/techno-oligarchy in less than two years. It has never been more clear nor obvious in any part of our history than now that our “leaders” are not in fact the organ grinders; and never before have so many of us had the truth of our enslavement projected into our faces with barely a cursory nod to propagandistic deception whilst so few of us seem to feel that we are either capable of doing or should do anything about it. However, I will not spend time on this point. This is a blog not so much about praxis, but theory. Until we can to some significant degree understand the nature and failures of our theological, philosophical, and political environments, our praxis is limited. And, somewhat ironically, given this point, I believe that we will come to realize that speaking, reasoning, preaching, conversing, and writing, is and has always been the best offense and defense with respect to tyranny. So, yes, maybe this blog is about praxis after all.

Why You Should be Wary of Churches with “Grace” in the Name: The twisted doctrine of grace

Calvinism/Philosophy, Christian fallacy, Uncategorized, ,

My in laws moved just down the road from us this summer. Being the good conservative Christians that they are, they immediately began shopping around for a suitable church. After a few weeks they finally decided on the church which is even closer down the road to us than they are. The name of this church is the name of the town we live in followed by the words “Grace Church” For example, say we live in Frisbeegolfville, the name of the church is “Frisbeegolfville Grace Church”.

Anytime I see the word “grace” in a church’s name, I recoil. I was a member of Sovereign Grace Ministries for about 15 years, and let me tell you, it’s no accident that they use the term “grace” in the name. There is a good reason for this…it’s intentional, and it speaks heavily to the theology they promote, and it’s not a good theology. Not at all. “Grace” is a nice word…but it’s doctrinal meaning is anything but. When you see “grace” read “existential dead end”, and it should trigger your survival instinct. I’m not saying all churches with “grace” in their name are dangerous, but it’s highly probable there is hella cognitive dissonance going on in there, and this dissonance can be downright destructive and even criminal if in any significant way taken to praxis.

Here’s the problem with “grace”: Grace is a doctrine which is supposed to describe how God saves the un-savable; loves the un-lovable; values the valueless. It is contradiction upon contradiction, and it vaporizes man into oblivion by its impossible metaphysics.

Grace” isn’t just a pleasant word to describe how God benevolently deals with his children…as in he doesn’t necessarily leave them to wallow in the guilt and pain of poor choices, but will step into help or comfort them should they have the morality and wisdom enough to recognize their mistakes, confess them to Him, ask for help in humility, and make some kind of commitment to doing better. Something like that, I suppose. No, in Christian doctrine, particularly of the Calvinist persuasion which so many Christians unfortunately presume is nothing more than good old fashioned Biblical Truth, “grace” is a sinister euphemism which implies a complete rejection of man at the most fundamental level. In other words, the doctrine of grace is an ontological description of man whereby he is condemned as being too evil to possess any useful or efficacious existence at all. It is the idea that one’s self is an illusion…that the unsaved man is pointless, and the saved man is just a manifestation of God, Himself, and thus is equally pointless. Those whom God “elects” to save are simply replaced by God (i.e. the Holy Spirit acting through man); those whom God does not elect are annihilated because they lack any intrinsic value or purpose. Of course the unsaved are called evil, but this is little more than an empty invective as their evil can never actually amount to any meaningful disruption of God’s will. The fact that they are evil is entirely irrelevant. They are said to be evil, but really they are nothing.

I know all that is a mouthful, and I’ve probably confused you. Please bear with me.

The doctrine of grace proceeds from the doctrine of Original Sin (neither of which are biblical, by the way…cobbled together by some fast and loose interpretations of the literature). Original sin states that we are all born with the mark of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. We are tainted at birth, and this evil pervades every aspect of our existence. What this means in practicality is that no distinction can be made between Evil and one’s very Self. There is no part of man which is not tainted, physically/spiritually/psychologically, and so it is impossible to describe man as anything other than evil, incarnate. Man’s original sin means that he is not actually man but is only evil. That is, Original Sin means that man IS Sin, itself, and not actually man at all.

I feel like I’m still confusing you…not your problem, but mine.

Think of it this way—say a person has cancer, but the doctors, upon examining his body, discover that there is literally no area which is not fully cancerous. At that point the man doesn’t have cancer, he is cancer, Now, extend that cancer to his mind and soul and you have a good metaphor for Original Sin.

Naturally Christians, upon seeing the doctrine exposed in its stark, psychotic fullness, recoil and condemn it as being a misguided oversimplification…and when it comes from a former Calvinist like me they call it heresy. It isn’t the former, but I’ll concede the latter…at least technically. I think they are the true heretics, but that’s by the by.

They will say things like, “Original sin doesn’t mean that man IS evil, only that, left to himself, his nature is such that he has a tendency toward evil.” I submit that Christians seem to have trouble distinguishing between “tendency” and “inexorable and unrelenting”. “Tendency” presumes that truly benevolent behaviors and ideas are performed, just not as frequently as malevolent ones. That’s NOT Original Sin. All behaviors and ideas are fully “tainted” with sin, which makes all behaviors and ideas fully sinful. All actions and thoughts and choices are infused with and corrupted by sin. Were you to parse those actions, thoughts, and choices down to their sub-parts, and those sub-parts into further sub-parts, and so on, you’d also find that they too are infused with sin. Do you see what I mean? Ask a Christian to describe for you where the sinful parts of body, mind, and soul end and the healthy parts begin. They simply cannot do this. This is because original sin is a function of man’s very existence, and you cannot parse existence down to components or categories. Something which exists IS. And IS is absolute. Man IS (i.e. man exists); man’s IS (i.e. man’s existence) is corrupted by sin, therefore man IS SIN. It’s a simple logical deduction. Furthermore, and not to put too fine a point on it, when tendency becomes the only thing you do, and always, because it’s a determinative aspect of your very existence—meaning, when faced with a choice to do or think evil or good you always choose evil—it’s no longer tendency, it’s your root nature.

Okay, that’s all well enough, but what does that have to do with grace?

If man is evil incarnate, as Original Sin demands (the equivocation and appeals to “divine mystery” you find in church notwithstanding) then both the saved and the unsaved find themselves in pretty much he exact same ontological position, just with different (and these differences are fundamentally irrelevant) manifestations. Both the saved and unsaved man are perpetually and fully sinful. For man who IS sin (i.e. born in Original Sin) his only real experience is that of “un-personing” or “un-being”—there is no man, only Sin.

What this means for salvation is the following: man who is saved is saved utterly in spite of himself; and man who is unsaved is condemned utterly in spite of himself. Original sin makes man’s very existence irrelevant. The doctrine of Grace then is supposed to explain how God deals with man when “man” becomes entirely without substance…an ontological exercise in futility.

Since man is born in sin, and indeed IS sin, then he clearly has no real means of expressing himself…he has no efficacious will and thus no real choice because any knowledge he possesses is subordinate to his sin instinct, making knowledge irrelevant. Man has no choice but to be and do evil, and therefore whatever knowledge he is said to possess is pointless to him. He cannot act in service to knowledge, he cannot make any real value judgements and then choose and act accordingly, but can only act service to what is his instinctual sin. Since man then is driven fully by sin, and thus is in all practicality sin, itself, man isn’t really man at all. He is the incarnation of Sin…he is a force of nature so to speak, not a consciousness…not thinking, nor feeling, nor valuing, nor choosing. He is, in short, not himself at all. So there is no man then to save. Man, being sin, has absolutely no value to God. Man presents as the very antithesis of God’s nature and character. So when God “saves” someone, well, it’s important to remember that man, being reduced to sin incarnate, doesn’t really exist to be saved in the first place.

What this means is that God cannot actually extend salvation TO anyone. There is no one to save, because whoever might have been been there to be saved has been eradicated by Adam’s inexorable, indelible, and absolute mark.

Who then is God saving? Well, you could say that God is saving himself. The saved person, according to the doctrine, is infused with the Holy Spirit—this is God’s grace to “him”—and it is this Spirit which acts then in accordance with God’s will, and can receive God’s love and hear God’s Truth and can act in service to that truth. Indeed, you will hear this all the time:

“How are you doing?” one asks the SAVED person.

“Better than I deserve,” is the pat reply.

One would think that one who is capable of doing good would thus deserve whatever benevolent and prosperous outcomes follow from this good, but notice how the knee-jerk response, even implicitly so, is to explain that even though one is (supposedly) saved and loved and given the power to know good and to act upon it one is still in this perpetual state of inability, insufficiency….evil. Even the saved person has been conditioned by the doctrine to accept that he is, at root, still just a sinful wretch, incapable of anything except expressions of evil, and thus undeserving of anything but hell and divine hatred.

What this means is that even the Christian understands that he has not really changed; that all that divine love and blessing and salvation of which he is the recipient is really not for him at all, but only for the Holy Spirit which acts “through” him…somehow…it is never really explained how the Holy Spirit can be compatible with that which represents the categorical antitheses of Himself, but whatever…it’s all mysticism, and we all know it…even as we try to ignore the cognitive dissonance, we still know it’s there. In other words, when Christians speak of the Holy Speaking working “through” them, they really mean that God is acting in spite of them. All good things that the saved man does, speaks, thinks, or experiences—all this grace—is to be attributed to God, not to man. This is because they understand, even if many of them cannot properly articulate it, that they are entirely irrelevant in their “personal relationship with Jesus”. They are still as sinful and wicked as the day they were born…their new “standing” in Christ, their “rebirth”, is merely academic. Whatever good they do is God; whatever good they experience is because of God and in spite of their evil, which sill pervasively characterizes the whole of their being. Whatever misfortune they experience and sin they commit is because they are, even after salvation, purely wicked in nature and being. Within the saved man is this infinite schism of identity…they are both Good and Evil together, but not really. .

This is grace, then. Meaning that God somehow gives one salvation and peace in spite of one’s perpetual and pervasive Original Sin. The truth though is that when God acts in spite of you because of what you ontologically ARE, then God doesn’t actually regard you at all. God cannot love you, nor extend you grace, because your very being represents what he must necessarily hate. God cannot value you because you embody that which God must necessarily consider valueless.

The doctrine of Grace implies a perpetual separation of man from God, and renders salvation not only completely arbitrary—because there could be no reason why God would choose to elect one utterly wicked soul instead of any other utterly wicked soul—but makes God out to be some kind of dabbler in madness and nonsense. Of course Christians will disagree…they will say that it’s not madness, only mystery. God’s ways are not our ways. Yet if we have no frame of reference for “God’s ways” because they necessarily present to us as a contradiction in terms (e.g. absolute Evil (fallen man) is compatible with absolute Good (God)), then such a mystery must always be perfectly mysterious, which renders it meaningless. In other words, a question which can have no answer (e.g. How can God save that which is utterly un-savable?) isn’t actually a question. It’s just noise.

But don’t worry….you won’t have to suffer the exasperation of having to explain this, or even simply discuss this kind of thing with most Christians. Ironically, those who profess to believe so ardently in things they would consider to be of supreme importance seem to spend and desire to spend as little time as possible actually thinking through their beliefs. As a general rule I have noticed that Christians do not like being challenged on their doctrines, and any attempts to reveal to them the strict and narrow rational limits of their ideas are almost always punted away with an appeal to some ineffable divine “mystery’…a mystery which somehow will be cleared up at some point when they get to heaven. Or not. They don’t really seem to care.

Ah, the palliative of “mystery”. The world collapses around you, but it’s all in God’s hands, right? What can you do anyway? You have no real power because you don’t really exist at all. Drink a toast to divine mystery and make a virtue out of object failure and presto! Faith!

Anyway, be wary of “grace”. It might not mean what you think it means.

-Argo