The Sin of Safety

I’ve approached this at least once before. Let’s see if we can expand the comment so folks have no excuse.
God’s Word is confusing only if you refuse to read it the way it was written. The Hebrew mystical approach to life recognizes this world is a sewer at best, a massive forest of shadows and lies. You can find truth in this world, but it didn’t come from this world. You can also think you’ve found some truth if you wallow in self-deception, but all truth starts with God’s revelation.
His revelation says rather bluntly this realm of existence is messed up, broken, permanently damaged in its fundamental nature. In no uncertain terms He has warned it will not be fixed ever, but will eventually be destroyed and replaced with something better. If you have sufficient intelligence to recognize beauty and truth when it appears in this realm, you ain’t seen nothing yet. But the really good stuff God is serving up later is not going to happen in this realm. This entire universe, all of Creation, is slated for destruction. End of story.
As a part of recognizing that truth, you realize God has offered a temporary provision for taking care of business in the meantime. I refer to it as the Laws of God, the moral fabric of the universe and the invisible truth behind the shadows of this realm. People who are spiritually aware can see these things, can see beyond the obvious and apparent “reality” to something deeper. Because I have seen evidence of that sensitivity outside the Christian religion, I would never claim only Christians can see it. Thus, you won’t get from me a doctrinal assertion you have to share my theology to share my mystical apprehensions. You don’t have to believe in my God to benefit from His truth.
What I do assert is His Laws bluntly say you cannot get perfection here. Further, you really can’t even get much good. It’s just barely possible to have something decent if you’ll apply the full range of prescriptions in His Laws, but that has never been done consistently, so I’m pretty cynical about it happening. Look, God gave it to some folks on a silver platter and they threw it away. I rather doubt any significant portion of humanity will ever rise to that height again. So we should expect things to be pretty shitty, which is what comes with living in a sewer.
That means you should reasonably expect a certain amount of death and destruction. At our best as humans, we will be killing numbers of each other at a basal rate of attrition. Try not to be asinine enough to waste time on calculating numbers; embrace the concept. God says so. Ever hear of Afghanistan? Left to themselves, they carry out on-going warfare which works out to a rough equilibrium. Interfering from the outside simply guarantees even worse death and destruction, but pushes it out to a longer and much deeper wave pattern. Even the slightest interference at all will change their cycle. Meanwhile, whomever is stupid enough and arrogant enough to interfere inevitably causes greater death and destruction than those alleged wild Afghan tribal warlords. In the process, the interfering “civilization” is always in the end far less civilized than the Afghans. They tend to stop with a certain minimal amount of death, but civilized people always tend to absolutism, as in genocide.
Genghis Khan felt it was necessary to extend his dominion over Afghanistan. The only way he could do it was in total annihilation of the population. Granted, those still living in places he had not yet visited decided to stop resisting. But then Khan left and they went back to their old ways. But his plan was pretty much what ours is turning out to be. Only we are more hateful about it. Khan didn’t feel too much anger and passion about it, just psychopathic resolve. Kill them all and there will be peace. There’s a nugget of truth there. The price of safety is killing everyone you try to keep “safe.” The price for optimum existence on earth is minding your own business. Stop trying to fix things you can’t possibly comprehend. Least of all can you comprehend it better than the God who made all things. I would suggest the Afghans are among the most realistically civilized humans on the planet.
This drive to efficiency, as if human life can be measured in terms of economic units, is about as Satanic as it gets. This is the fundamental approach of all Western Civilization, all Western philosophy. Reducing things to calculations of efficiency is poking God in the eye. He might be slow to react as we measure things, but His reactions can’t be measured on our scales when they come. How do you argue with someone who can make your planet dissolve into subatomic particles? His revelation says if He doesn’t actively hold things together, that evaporation is what happens.
I won’t take up the room here to detail all the ways in which a righteous man under God’s Laws would have to kill people we somehow insist must be left alive, while that man would spare people we insist on killing. In the balance of things, we slaughter far more than the Laws of God suggest is necessary, and we slaughter the ones He would leave alive. We refuse to correct those He says are wrong, refusing to correct the things He says are wrong. A critical part of our failure is the unspeakable arrogance of demanding for ourselves what we cannot bear others having.
Stop pretending you can make your world safer and more efficient than God says is possible. You will be fighting Him, at the very least calling Him a liar to His face.