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Everyone Expects Some Future Opposition

2/17/2024

Dosteovsky’s The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor begins with Jesus “quietly, unostentatiously” appearing before a crowd of people gathered near the Seville Cathedral during the height of the Spanish Inquisition “where the bonfires of heretics had begun to crackle.”

Jesus arrives unannounced, yet “everyone recognizes Him” and all “rush towards Him with invincible force, surround Him, mass around him, follow Him.” Within moments, He cures a man of blindness and raises a little girl from the dead.

The Grand Inquisitor has observed this all from a distance and peremptorily orders his guards to arrest Him.

Now, you would think that a group of people who had just witnessed not one but two miracles attesting to the reality of Jesus being present among them would object to or resist the arrest order the Grand Inquisitor has uttered.

I mean, it is common sense, right? Logical. Moral.

Well, very few writers understood the inherent flaws of common sense, logic, and morality as deeply and incisively as Dostoevsky, who, through the narrator Ivan, describes the crowd’s reaction in the following way (editing, bold added):

And lo, such is his (the Grand Inquisitor’s) power and so accustomed, submissive, and tremblingly obedient to him are the people that the crowd immediately parts before the guards, and they, amidst the sepulchral silence that has suddenly fallen, place their hands on Him and march Him away.

Instantly, the crowd, almost as one man, bow their heads to the ground before the Elder-Inquisitor, and without uttering a word, he blesses the people and passes on his way.

I refer to the opening scene of The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor here because I believe it exposes the errancy of all ongoing contemporary delusions about people collectively resisting the System or rising to fight the powers that should not be.

But Dostoevsky takes the insight even further. The guards extract Jesus from the crowd and lock Him in prison. After nightfall, the Grand Inquisitor descends and visits the prisoner and divulges the following:

I do not know who you are, and I do not want to know: you may be He, or you may be only His likeness, but tomorrow I shall find you guilty and burn you at the stake as the most wicked of heretics, and those same people who today kissed your feet will tomorrow at one wave of my hand rush to rake up the embers on your bonfire, do you know that?

And after a moment “of heartfelt reflection,” the Grand Inquisitor adds, “Yes, I daresay you do.”

Something to keep in mind next time you encounter assurances that people will collectively resist and rise once they become aware of such-and-such or wake up to what's really going on or understand this-and-that or realize whatever there is to realize.

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Our Sauron Has the Ring Firmly in His Possession -- Start There

2/15/2024

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Some thoughts edited from a response to JM Smith at this post:

Unlike the Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, our Sauron has the Ring firmly in his possession and rules over all accordingly.

Our quest to destroy the Ring and create something better in its place failed a few centuries back. We now dwell in the consequences of that failure. Once again, our Sauron has the Ring in his possession and wields it accordingly:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

We don't have to worry much about destroying the Ring physically/materially. Sauron is taking care of that himself.

Our task involves destroying the Ring and its associated power spiritually within ourselves, which entails moving beyond all of Suaron's Ring machinations and recognizing that our only hope lies in our creative spiritual activity outwith the Ring-System, in Sauron not finding, bringing, and binding us in the darkness spiritually.

And since the material is just a subset of the spiritual, our spiritual activity does and will affect the Ring System, but not in the way Sauron expects or foresees.

You often use the term quietism here. I don't know why. I reject quietism, but its opposite is not "Hey, let's stay politically active in Sauron's totalitarian one-ring System so he can find us, bind us in the darkness, and keep us in the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie!"

"only a conviction that I want to leave my children and grandchildren a world in which they are free to be something like me. Not replicas, but showing a family resemblance."

Forget abstractions like "world." Focus on your children and grandchildren as beings you love. That is the world.

Motivate them to recognize that their freedom does not depend on Sauron and his Ring System.

Understand that you can't give your children or grandchildren a free world -- that must be won by each individual. Understand that without that freedom, no individual can pursue the good.

Understand that their future will inevitably differ from yours regardless of what you do -- because agency, motivation, causality, etc.

Have faith that God will always leave open paths to goodness, beauty, truth, and ultimately, salvation regardless of what Sauron does or doesn't do.

Sauron lost the Ring once. Who is to say he cannot lose it again?

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Respectfully Decline

2/14/2024

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I had the opportunity to become the head of my department at work five years ago. I respectfully declined.

I was asked to join the committee of the small local church a few months later. I respectfully declined.

Today, I was offered a representative seat on my village’s municipal council. I respectfully declined.

I don’t think there is anything else on the horizon that I can be asked to do or join in the interest of society; however, if any other offers are forthcoming, I will probably decline them all — respectfully, of course.

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Using Evil Against Evil Can Never Be Good

2/11/2024

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Warning: This post resides in "beating a dead horse" territory, but here goes nothing...

And behold! in our need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say; a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the enemy against him. The fearless, the ruthless, these alone will achieve victory. What could not a warrior do in this great hour, a great leader? What could not Aragorn do? Or if he refuses, why not Boromir? The Ring would give me power of Command. How I would drive the hosts of Mordor, and all men would flock to my banner!

The passage above — taken from the final pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring — reveals the spiritual dangers inherent in what Dr. Charlton has frequently referred to as the Boromir Strategy.

The Boromir Strategy — using the power of the enemy against the enemy — is straightforward and easy to comprehend. On the surface, Hey lads, let's use the One Ring to fight Sauron!, comes off as a veritable no-brainer, a golden opportunity, an unquestionable gift that, in the name of all that is Good, should not and cannot be passed up.

Yet Tolkien wastes no time revealing the negative spiritual implications of harnessing the power of evil to fight evil. After Frodo escapes Boromir’s attempts to secure the ring, he pauses in the sunlight and resolutely states, “This at least is plain: the evil of the Ring is already at work in the Company, and the Ring must leave them before it does more harm…”, which is followed by the acknowledgment that “...Boromir has fallen into evil.”

As noted above, the initial allure of the Boromir Strategy is straightforward and easy to comprehend, but the spiritual insight and warning Tolkien communicates — if you use the power of evil to fight evil, you become evil — should be even more undemanding and lucid, provided one’s spiritual orientation and discernment are firmly in place.

Something to think about the next time (and countless other times) you hear a fellow Christian insist on the necessity of using the enemy’s (insert contemporary replacement for Ring of Power here) against him to win the spiritual war.

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Going Where We Need to Go Versus Going Absolutely Nowhere

2/9/2024

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In his most recent post at From the Narrow Desert, William James Tychonievich describes an image of a stag with a cross between its antlers that he spotted in a restaurant mural.

William eventually connects the symbol to the Jägermeister logo and the Laihona. I had never heard of the Laihona before, so I looked into it. According to the Book of Mormon and other LDS sources, a Laihona is a brass ball with two spindles that operates as a sort of compass. By following the direction in which one of the spindles pointed, Lehi and his party determined where they should go after escaping Jerusalem.

However, the Book of Mormon emphasizes that the Laihona only worked if its users were faithful.

From the Book of Alma:

38 And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the thing which our fathers call a ball, or director—or our fathers called it a Liahona, which is, being interpreted, a compass; and the Lord prepared it.

39 And behold, there cannot any man work after the manner of so curious a workmanship. And behold, it was prepared to show unto our fathers the course which they should travel in the wilderness.

40 And it did work for them according to their faith in God; therefore, if they had faith to believe that God could cause that those spindles should point the way they should go, behold, it was done; therefore they had this miracle, and also many other miracles wrought by the power of God, day by day.

The connection William makes between the stag and the Laihona is a notable one: both involve spiritually guiding or leading people where they need to go.

As I have noted on this blog, the white stag — also called the miraculous stag — occupies a big place in Hungarian mythology.

According to legend, a white stag led Hunor and Magar to Scythia, thereby establishing the Hun and Magyar people, who eventually moved into the Carpathian Basin. Some eighteenth-century German settlers to Hungary identified with the white stag and featured it in the emblems of the villages they established.

The white stag trope also appears in the mythology and folklore of other peoples/cultures, including the Arthurian legends in England, and as commenter WW notes under William’s post, C.S. Lewis includes a white stag in his The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to lead the Pevensie children where they needed to go.

The association of the white stag with Christ in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions likely stems from the conversion story of Saint Eustace, who experienced a vision of a cross or crucifix appearing between the antlers of a stag he was hunting. The cross/crucifix/antler vision also appears in the story of St. Hubertus, who was also hunting a stag.

Anyone who has visited this site will surely have noticed the stag with the crucifix between the antlers on the blog header. The image is a detail taken from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of Saint Eustace, and what it depicts has become my way of reminding myself of the purpose of mortal life, that is, figuring out where we need to go and coming to the faith-filled understanding that Jesus is ultimately “where” we need to go.

In connection with this, I left the following comment on William’s antler post:

I like the stag-antler-crucifix symbolism because it includes the notion of actively pursuing something/following something to where you need to go, coupled with the reality that, ultimately, Christ is the "where" that you "need to go."

However, like the Laihona, the white stag with the cross/crucifix between the antlers works according to our faith in God, and our faith in God works according to our deepest and most sincerely held assumptions concerning the fundamental nature of reality and the divine purposes underpinning Creation — and then thinking according to these assumptions.

Without that, we will be diverted from “where we need to go” as we travel through the wilderness and remain in a no-where we never left.

Dr. Charlton -- who has also been connected to the antler/crucifix/St. Eustace in a meme, of all things -- explains (bold added):

What is needed is such a fundamental change in our current and recent attitudes and understanding as to be mind-exploding; a living world, a conscious world, a world primarily of Beings, a world primarily of spirit, a world that is God's creation and directed towards Christ's salvation...

Yet anything less leaves us exactly where we are.

For far too long, Christians have been pouring the new-wine of a life of Love following Jesus, into the old-bottle of abstract, materialist thinking that posits the irrelevance of Love and regards following Jesus as just-another-set-of-processes - firmly located within the usual kinds of social process.

Christians do some different things; but they think in the same way as everybody else - so that when times are tough, their ingrained and habitual materialistic-abstract-externally-driven mode of thinking limits and controls everything they do.

Christians shall persist in getting absolutely nowhere - except to remain a "lifestyle option" within a hell-bound totalitarianism; unless and until we begin and continue to think the work of God.

Note: The "need" in "place we need to go" is, of course, opt-in. It can't be compelled. However, that does not imply that the "need" is in any way unnecessary.

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I Guess Only Some Russians Love Their Children, Too

2/8/2024

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Ah, Sting.

During a concert in Poland last summer, he warned his audience that "democracy was under attack worldwide" and described the Ukraine conflict as "an absurdity based on a lie."

Claiming that "democracy was in grave danger unless we defend it," Sting then went on to say that "the alternative to democracy is a prison, a prison of the mind. The alternative to democracy is violence, oppression, imprisonment and silence."

These words were then followed by a throat-slitting gesture.

Nothing surprising in all that, I suppose.

Anyway, I bring Sting up because his song Russians inexplicably popped into my head the other day, and I thought, "Now, there's a song that's probably become a bit awkward given current circumstances."

Rest assured. Sting is on the case.

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Addition to the Blog Roll

2/6/2024

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Trees and Triads, courtesy of a gentleman who goes by the name, Laeth.

A few short samples of his aphorisms:

we need to find new ways of expressing eternal truths. the old ways, good as they were, will now get you censored, excommunicated, fired, imprisoned or even killed. there has never been such an artistic challenge in all of history. may we rise to the occasion.

contrary to both popular and conspiratorial belief, the Lord of the Rings is neither fiction nor about the ancient past. it was a prophecy about the future. a future that is now present.

not everything is hopeless, but some things are - quite demonstrably so. it is hopeless to have hope in what is hopeless. hope is a seed. and wasting of seed is a sin.

I often get to the heart attack of the matter.

no one wants to talk about the room in the elephant.

when you do not allow yourself to worship freely all the Good, True and Beautiful beings that exist, you end up worshiping those modern golden calves called religious institutions, and sacrificing your very intelligence to them.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The essay By the waters of Mormon: an open letter to Christian esoterists is very good.

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What is Repentance, Then? (Particularly When It Comes to the Difficult to Conquer Sexy Stuff?)

2/5/2024

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When it comes to the sexual stuff associated with lust, the biggest problem Christians face is not sin, but the refusal to repent.

Many Christians refuse to acknowledge lust (and everything associated with it) as sin because they don't want to feel bad about the lust they experience.

On the contrary, they want to feel good about it, and the best way to do that it is to redfine lust as not-sin.

Not-sin means no repentance required. Yay! Problem solved!

Not so fast...

Over at From the Narrow Desert, Wm Jas Tychonievich offers an incisive explanation of what repentance is and why it is so crucial (bold and slight editing added):

True repentance is not an emotion any more than the pure love of Christ is an emotion, and obviously repentance doesn't mean never doing anything bad ever again. God would have designed this world rather differently if that was what he expected!

What is repentance, then? My current understanding is that repentance is confession. No, not confession in the sense of saying, "Bless me, Father, for I have committed adultery in my heart 700 times this week." Confession doesn't mean rattling off an itemized list of one's recent misdeeds to God or a priest.

It means acknowledging sin as sin.

The unrepentant are those who make excuses for themselves, who deny that their sins are sins and are therefore unwilling to give them up. Willingness is all; the flesh is weak, but the spirit must be willing.

Daily repentance does not mean daily groveling for forgiveness like a beaten dog; it means reminding oneself what is good and what is evil, what is of God and what is not, and then going on with life, confident in the knowledge that "he that believeth is not condemned."

And yes, of course we should try to be virtuous and to sin less, but in the end no such projects can really succeed in this present life.

They are not what repentance is, and they are not that on which salvation depends.

Read the rest of Wm's lucid thoughts on repentance here.

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Easy to Reside in the City of Lust

2/5/2024

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A little addendum on the topic of lust...

“There’s a constant struggle inside each and every one of us. Part of us strives for high things. Good things. Another part of us is tempted by low things. Vulgar things. It’s as if there are two cities within us – a city of love and a city of lust.

People oscillate between the two cities their whole lives because it is not easy to live purely in the city of love. It is, however, very easy to reside purely in the city of lust. And I’m not only referring to sex. There is more to lust than that.”

Reinhardt paused for a moment and looked at the pigeon on the lamppost. He quickly realized it was not a pigeon at all, but a dove. He watched it take off from the lamppost and flap away past the buildings around the corner. He smiled and decided to wrap up the conversation.

“I want you to live in the right city. Don’t become a slave to earthly desires. Focus on higher things. Find your purpose in life. Be your true self. You asked God to put you here for a reason. Discover what that reason is. And if and when you step into the city of lust – because you will from time to time – acknowledge your misstep.

Be repentant. Learn from the experience and work to return to the city of love – to your true purpose; your real self. Do you understand?”

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The Society of the Crossed Keys is Real???!!!

2/4/2024

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Anyone who has seen Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel is sure to recall the somewhat secretive and close-knit network of hotel concierges known as The Society of the Crossed Keys.

Among the members of this illustrious and influential organization is the suave Monsieur Gustav H. — concierge of an exclusive mountainside resort known as The Grand Budapest Hotel — who boasts of his uncanny ability to secure virtually anything his guests desire all at a moment’s notice.

In the clip below, Gustav H. calls upon his front dest brothers-in-uniform to help him escape from a bind.

Well, it turns out that there is a Society of the Crossed Keys in real life as well:

The Les Clefs d’Or is the professional union of concierges. They have more than 4,000 members in 80 countries and 530 places in the world. The roots of the organisation date back to 1929. However, the institution was officially founded only in 1952 in France. It is a nonprofit organisation resting on two pillars: service and friendship.

See their logo below. Note the crossed keys!

Fittingly enough, a concierge in Budapest (the city, not the Grand Hotel) has just been awarded the "golden keys":

Réka Tóth will represent Hungary in the international organisation Tóth got the Golden Key since she has years of concierge experience, completed several tests and proved that she can provide the highest quality service imaginable in every situation.

As a result, she can pin the key on her uniform, which guests can easily recognise. The applications are evaluated by the relevant committee of the Les Clefs d’Or. That is followed by an interview. Afterwards, the committee decides who to give the key to.

Réka Tóth graduated from Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and Budapest Business University (BGE). During her career, she strengthened the realm of the InterContinental and Sofitel.

I'm sure Ms. Tóth will be more than happy to put her vast networking skills to use should you ever require front row aisle seats for a first night at the Opera Toscana on one day's notice or a corner table at Chez Dominique on a Thursday.

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