Love Has Been Inverted, But Christians Cannot Abandon Love

1/4/2023

The inversion of love is one of the most devastating weapons wielded by forces opposed to God and Creation. Hardly a secret.

At the same time, barely anyone in the modern world appears immune to evil’s uncanny ability to turn the true meaning of love inside out. Christians – the vast majority of whom subscribe to some syrupy and perverted principle or the moral practice of altruism – are no exception here. Ask the average Christian to define love and you will find the definition differs only slightly from mainstream leftist interpretations, presuming it differs at all.

Categorizing the abject failure to comprehend and practice true love under the "spiritual catastrophe" column seems insufficient. Apocalyptic is a more fitting way to describe it. Of course, not all are blind to the demonic inversions of love and the disastrous consequences the inversions inflict. Fittingly enough, many are revolted by the inversions. Unfortunately, this revulsion tends to bleed into love itself. Utterly repulsed by the anti-love the forces opposed to God and Creation promulgate as love, those who discern the inversion often fall into the trap of abandoning love altogether.

The impetus to turn one’s back on love most likely stems from an erroneous conception of love as a weak, frail, enervated force susceptible to constant and continuous manipulation and degradation. From this perspective, love is a weakness rather than a strength – a force that diminishes and disempowers rather than a force that fortifies and empowers.

From this point of view, love only renders individuals vulnerable, pliable, impressionable, compliant, and yielding. After all, tough times call for tough men with tough demeanors, not sickly-sweet, saccharine cornballs waxing on about love. Especially not when the demonic Establishment waxes on about loving mankind via diversity, inclusivity, equality, and keeping everyone safe.

Whenever I write about love on this blog, I inevitably attract the attention of tough guys who are quick to equate my insistence on the fundamental necessity of love with the Establishment’s inversions of love. As far as the tough guys are concerned, love is the last thing the world needs, particularly when modern notions of love include the destruction of one’s people and homeland, the active encouragement and advancement of sexual perversions, the willing embracing of totalitarianism, etc.

Tough guys, listen – I know where you are coming from, and I tip my hat to your uncanny ability to see through the lies of modern inverted love. I’m with you as far as turning your backs on inverted love goes, but I part ways with you when you advocate for the abandonment of love altogether, particularly when you claim to be a Christian.

Like it or not, love is the fundamental nature of reality – the metaphysical foundation of Creation. Moreover, you cannot actively oppose love if you profess to be a follower of Christ. Learning about love and learning to love are the primary purposes of our mortal lives in this world.

Figuring out that inverted love is not love is barely one-tenth of the battle. Turning your back on love entirely because of inverted love means you’ve lost the battle.

So turn your tough-minded self back around and start learning about what love means and what it really is, and when you’re ready, begin loving. Consider it your duty.

Turning your back on love or refusing to love does little more than play into the enemy’s hands. After all, the enemy desires nothing more than a world of death peopled by the unloved and the unloving.

Why do you think the enemy worked so hard to invert love in the first place?

Huh, tough guy?

Note added: Love was central to Jesus's mission, and as far as I'm concerned, Jesus was the toughest guy the world has ever known. Something to think about.

17 Comments

bruce g charlton

1/4/2023 12:47:18

@Frank - Well said!

It's interesting, too, how so many these tough guys feel compelled to shelter behind pseudonymity.

I can understand reasons why this may be necessary for some people - but it is not compatible with a tough guy persona, nor with egging other people to 'MAKE A STAND, TAKE ACTION'.

More broadly; this is an example of what I was writing about recently to do with philosophers such as Nietzsche; who analyze everything down to its deep/ essential/ core principles... except Christianity; which is judged superficially and 'sociologically' by common or average contemporary behaviours observed among those who are thus self-identified.

Francis Berger

1/4/2023 15:42:35

@ Bruce - Your criticism of Nietzsche mirrors my own understanding of his philosophical shortcomings. If he had managed to separate Christianity from the bourgeois milieu that he was devastatingly incisive of, he could have taken his philosophy in an entirely different and much needed direction. What a different world this would be had Nietzsche been a Christian!

Otherwise, tough guys aside, I am convinced that all Christians need to re-evaluate what Christian love is and means and work their forward from there. Inversions rarely self-correct. On the contrary, they tend to become even more inverted if nothing is ever done about them.

Anti-Gnostic

1/4/2023 20:59:10

Couple of points in response:

1. At some point ideals will have to be translated into action. It won't be me; I'm too old, and the regime is not--so far--that overbearing. But somebody younger with dependent children eventually is going to be faced with the choice to do something and have a Christendom in which to raise a Christian family, or do nothing, and continue Christianity's withdrawal into atomized, individualist gnosticism. Iraqi Christian villagers of the preceding decade translated their faith into action. They organized, fought back against the Sunnis, and killed for their Christendom and resumption of liturgical worship. Whether it comes down to such a stark choice in the secular Americas, future generations will see. But I submit those Iraqi villagers acted out of love, not the prolapsed, unitarian version of love which the super-majority of Christians and practically all clergy and hierarchs espouse as true Christian praxis.

2. Criticism of Nietzche as failing to drill down into "essential" Christianity is tendentious. The Romantic Christianity you and others have arrived at is simply the latest espousal of the Faith by a handful of individuals. Whether it is Divine Truth or just the latest sectarian interpretation of the Biblical canon neither I nor anybody else has any way to judge. If in fact the Christian faith amounts solely to a matter of individual discernment, then I'd say the era of Christianity as a universal, objective creed is over. There is no canon, no universal praxis, and no liturgy--just another individual metaphysics in the religious/ideological bazaar that the modern world has become. To adopt a novel interpretation of Christianity and say Nietzche or anybody else just missed it is, as I said, tendentious.

1/5/2023 08:23:22

@ Anti-Gnostic - For the sake of argument, let's assume Nietzsche did indeed drill down into essential Christianity. What was his conclusion? He concluded that Christianity is not true. Thus, he sought his answers to elsewhere.

You may call it tendentious, but I do not believe Nietzsche succeeded in drilling down to essential Christianity, partly because essential Christianity requires little drilling down to begin with. Essential Christianity is the belief in creativity -- that neither Christianity nor man are finished products.

The world told Nietzsche that Christianity and man were essentially finished products. Nietzsche accepted the former and rejected the latter. In his mind, Christianity was finished because Christianity itself insisted it was finished, but he held out hope for man and directed his creativity into new values and the emergence of superman. In this regard, Nietzsche got half of the equation right.

Outward, mainstream, conventional, traditional external Christianity insists Christianity is finished. Once again, this is partly true. Outward, mainstream, conventional, traditional, external Christianity is finished every time it rejects creativity and the development of consciousness. This is the Christianity Nietzsche recognized as dead and rebelled against, but he never considered that Christianity might not stop there, that it can continue forward creatively if geniuses like him had/can see a place for themselves within it -- but Nietzsche did not make that connection. He discarded Christianity as untrue.

1/6/2023 02:23:13

Bruce's criticism was actually that Nietzche had not examined Christianity to its deep essential/core principles. You have framed those principels as, "Essential Christianity is the belief in creativity -- that neither Christianity nor man are finished products." I'm not sure what this means, but my 2 cents would be that essential Christianity is Mark 12:29-31, a sentiment which Nietzche actually had inscribed on his father's tombstone. But that leaves a lot of questions still unanswered regarding how then should we live and regard ourselves. To say that Nietzche erred because he didn't come up with the same novel and idiosyncratic tenets of the Christian faith as you and Bruce is not meeting the merits of Nietzche's arguments.

Lady Mermaid link

1/5/2023 01:46:52

Excellent post! The same inversions are happening to concepts like freedom and liberty. Unfortunately, demonic perversions of fundamentally good things have led some people to renounce them in their entirety.

The best definition of love is found in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient and kind, but it goes much deeper than the syrupy feel good altruism of modernity. It also refuses to delight in evil but rejoices in truth. A lot of people, including modern reactionaries, mistake love to excuse and justify sin. On the contrary, real love will oppose evil.

1/5/2023 08:28:06

@ Lady Mermaid - Real love opposes evil for the same reason real freedom does -- because real love and real freedom are spiritual/metaphysical realities, not mere concepts. People have forgotten this. They treat both as concepts -- as abstract ideas. It's relatively easy to switch one concept for another. Quite impossible with spiritual/metaphysical realities.

NLR

1/6/2023 15:07:28

"real love and real freedom are spiritual/metaphysical realities, not mere concepts"

That's right. That's the real issue: regardless of whatever people say love and freedom are, what is the reality behind those words?

Also, can an individual act according to those realities regardless of what large numbers of other people say or do?

That's the key point. It is true that within public discourse as it now is, it's all about what you can persuade enough people to believe. Furthermore, you have to get a lot of people to believe it or it won't be influential. Yes, all that is very powerful and influential and it affects all our lives.

But to stop there is just predeciding in favor of all that stuff, that that's all that matters.

If Christianity and love are real, then they are real, regardless of what people say or don't say.

1/6/2023 15:09:51

By the way, that kind of thinking is what made science succesful. How does nature work? Not what you can persuade someone about how nature works or what might be useful if nature worked that way. But how it actually works, regardless of what anyone thinks or says.

In constrast to "the science", which is just sociological maniuplation.

Tough Goy

1/5/2023 02:56:10

Pilate asked the wrong question. He should have asked "Love. What is love?"

1/5/2023 08:33:18

@ Tough Goy - Well, if Haddaway is any guide, the answer to "What is love?" is "Baby, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more."

William WIldblood

1/5/2023 10:34:14

Superb post, Frank. You've summed up the problem perfectly. This inversion of love is one of the major indicators that what is happening today is not just a natural result of humanity falling away from religion but deliberately orchestrated by evil powers, the full recognition of which is one of the major tasks of the modern disciple. The corruption of the best is the worst.

1/5/2023 19:50:38

@ William - Thanks! Yes, the obvious clue is in the fact that the inversion is mandated and enforced.

JMSmith

1/5/2023 14:46:40

When you say "love is the fundamental nature of reality," I think you're both right and wrong. Love is like the true king that is presently in exile. His kingship is real but not actual. Our actual world is ruled by a usurper, although renegade love still holds court here and there in the catacombs.

You are right that Christian love must be distinguished from sentimental philanthropy and romantic mush, but you've going to be fighting an uphill battle.

1/5/2023 19:47:33

@ JM - When it comes to this world, I would say you are correct, but reality is much more than this world and what we think we perceive in it.

ben

1/5/2023 19:54:58

Surely not an accident that the word that should be least tortured is the word that is most.

1/6/2023 08:32:00

@ Anti-Gnostic - I do not dispute the merits of Nietzsche's arguments against what he observed to be Christianity. On the contrary I affirm them. The legalistic concept of Christianity and God needs to be "grown out of" because it no longer suits the current stage of man's evolving consciousness. I also affirm Nietzsche's search for positive values beyond this conceptualization -- the upsurge of creative being that inspires man toward life and higher values. Where I differ from Nietzsche is Christ. Nietzsche believed all of this was only possible without Christ. I, on the other hand, believe it is impossible without Christ. Nietzsche's diagnosis is correct, and the general thrust of his potential cure points in the right direction, but his philosophy ultimately fails because it removes Christ from the equation. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche's contemporary, understood why Christ is essential (and also why it is so difficult to follow Christ). The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor chapter in the Brothers Karamazov lays it out well. In the passage below, the Grand Inquisitor rebukes Christ for burdening man with freedom and the duty of value creation: "Instead of taking mastery of people's freedom, you augmented it and saddled the spiritual kingdom of man with it for ever. You desired that man's love should be free, that he should follow you freely, enticed and captivated by you. Henceforth, in place of the old, firm law, man was himself to decide with a free heart what is good and what is evil, with only your image before him to guide him—but surely you never dreamed that he would at last reject and call into question even your image and your truth were he to be oppressed by so terrible a burden as freedom of choice? They will exclaim at last that the truth is not in you, for it would have been impossible to leave them in more confusion and torment than you did when you left them so many worries and unsolvable problems."

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Love Has Been Inverted, But Christians Cannot Abandon Love

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