Misguidance

Western Christianity is fighting the wrong battle.

Being somewhat nerdy, I’ve read tons of fiction, including a whole library of futuristic science fiction and fantasy tales. Most of them are built on the typical Western mythology — little more than variations on Beowulf as told by Homer. It was all wonderfully entertaining and I did absorb a great deal of unconventional thinking. As a side note, children today will face a relentless feminist publishing industry, so the mythology has shifted a bit to far more conformist thinking, but that’s another story for another day. Our society today is still heavily influenced by the reading I had in my youth.

That influence shows up in mainstream Christian mythology, taking note that a great deal of non-Christian society shares the same moral assumptions. Things are complicated and it bears a brief analysis. Western Christianity is relentlessly purpose driven in the cheap imitation of the gospel message as propaganda. There is a powerful demand by some that art by Christians should be blatantly “Christian art” or the artists have failed their duty. Meanwhile, art that takes Christian morals seriously takes a beating among secularists, not so much because it isn’t good art, but as a reaction to that overzealous nonsense. Still, the net result is that this perverted Westernized brand of Christian morality is far more influential than most like to admit, simply because it is the established moral mythology against which even its worst enemies define their attacks.

The point is that we have epic battles against good and evil. Never mind the outcomes, there is a presumption of a recognized definition of good and evil. Even those who reject the broad definitions are forced to use them as a foil. The competing value systems are pretty much all of a type, and anyone with a bit of comparative civilization background can recognize it. You recognize common features: the myth of the great man (hero/heroine/antihero), the myth of the great battle, etc. It’s a sort of vicious circle reflected everywhere — reality is alternatively boring or pointlessly terrifying, so we aren’t entertained with that. We want fiction that entertains by taking us away from reality. It’s the same reason your American news broadcast is loaded with spectacle — if it bleeds, it leads — and chasing celebrities. It shapes our perception of the world and we demand more of the same, a self-confirming bias. We color everything with simplistic values because of this.

It’s not that the ANE Bible viewpoint lacks heroes, for example. Rather, the whole concept of what it means to be a hero is radically different. But our Western assumptions keep us from seeing that. So the mention of “Antichrist” brings up a wealth of meaning that simply is not right, totally missing the point of what the Apostles were trying to tell their readers. The image of Nicolae Carpathia from Left Behind (particularly the movie) shares precious little of the New Testament image. Most people who already agree with that statement would make only minor changes within the Western tradition; I have had serious difficulty finding people who critique it from a non-Western viewpoint.

In the Bible, Antichrist was never meant to be a single figure somewhere in our future. The label applies to a human tendency that remains hard-wired into fallen human nature. We are all just a bit of Antichrist. That tendency shows up in many ways and on many levels. Some of my readers are likely to understand what I mean when I say that Western Civilization is a primary manifestation of Antichrist. We end up with the recognition that Antichrist would lie about itself by pushing the image of an individual Son of Satan as a basic misguidance to keep itself hidden from view and safe from opposition.

My use of the term “The Cabal” in previous blog posts has, I’m sure, already confused some of you. It’s roughly equivalent to the foregoing description of Antichrist. There are in this world people who self-identify as sharing a common drive to dominate human existence. They do work together, sharing a self-conscious identity. If you attempt to associate them with any other established category, you’ll miss some of them. They are totally separate from mainstream ideas about human groupings. If I tell you they share some of the mindset with, say, Kabbalistic Hasidim Jews, that’s not the same thing as suggesting The Cabal is a bunch of them. Accurate or not, that misses the point. Don’t point to the Lubavitchers and call them The Cabal. I don’t use the term that way.

Rather, I am hoping you’ll realize that The Cabal acts and thinks somewhat like Lubavitchers, but that includes the necessity that you actually know something about that particular thread of Judaism. That’s part of the definition of The Cabal in the sense that very few people have an accurate analysis of Judaism at all. You might know what religious Jews want you to believe, but if you think they aren’t guarding some privacy quite different from the PR, you are a fool. One of the defining traits is not revealing much until they are in a position to fear no repercussions from folks who hold different values. You’ll see that trait in a lot of other human groupings, too. By its nature, this thing I call The Cabal would need to act that way to avoid opposition when they hold a weaker hand in the game — they bluff.

Meanwhile, my definition of The Cabal ropes in a bunch of folks who are rabidly antisemitic. One of the standard jokes is that an antisemite is anyone living or dead who is hated by at least one Jew. The point is that the whole question rests entirely in the minds of those who make the most noise about it. They are the ones who demand absolute control over all aspects of the conversation, so independent thought is simply forbidden before you open your mouth, and as much as possible, before you even think. It’s the ultimate expression of Thought Police. But there are plenty of folks who are openly honest about their broad spite for Jews and The Cabal includes some of these.

What matters here is how they operate. They view themselves as a higher species, and are paranoid about opposition. These folks do suffer a grand measure of self-interest, but the also share the same kind of self-interest. They define it all within a certain recognizable set of boundaries. It is their divinely appointed destiny to take over all human space, and any opposition is evil by definition. They are fully aware of the whole range of more common human moral values, and pointedly reject them even while promoting them for everyone else. Not in every detail, but the general shape of Western Civilization is the product of their maneuvering as agents of influence starting way back before the time Christ. Particulars of their agenda do drift over generations, as does a great deal of other identifying human factors, but the broader trend of their work is recognizable.

They do not possess the level of virtuosity that they imagine. This business of an immensely powerful individual with all of Satan’s powers at his disposal is a myth they promote. In their arrogance, they imagine it is partly true, but Satan simply does not work that way. That’s why I attack the popular image of the Devil. Our Enemy is not God’s enemy; he is forced to serve God in ways he himself finds unpleasant. That’s part of the punishment from his own fall from his original position. So while we can broadly say The Cabal is satanic and evil, it requires a boatload of explanation to qualify how those terms are used in the Bible. The Cabal as a bunch of people are pretty intelligent, but they are still people with some crazy ideas that simply do not reflect reality. Western Civilization reflects their own assumptions about things, and Western epistemology is a part of their broader philosophy, but only in the sense that they adopted it as a better expression of assumptions they held before Plato and Aristotle formulated their philosophies.

A primary difference is that The Cabal does not buy into much of the Germanic mythology. They are not Enlightenment folks, but use the dominating influence of the Enlightenment as a tool to keep the rest of humanity in line. Machiavelli and the Neocons use that same playbook.

By now it should be obvious that I avoid pointing at any particular individual and suggesting they are a member of The Cabal. It’s more like a religion and political party, a continuous discernible influence across recorded history. It remains self-consistent. It is recognizable by how it works, and we can associate some obscure writings with the broader agenda that it follows. Consider where I’m coming from. I take the Bible seriously; I hold myself accountable to it. I take seriously the task of understanding the Bible from the epistemology held by the people who wrote it. I take seriously the necessity of applying that epistemology to all questions, particularly the question of how we should live our lives. At the same time, I take into account everything Western Civilization can tell me about human history and human nature from its own perspective. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do contend this is the best explanation from all those inputs when answering the question of what we need to know about what opposes the mission of the gospel.

If we continue to swallow Western epistemology, we play into the hands of The Cabal. If we take the bait of blaming Jews, or Nazis, or secularists, or communists, or any other entity commonly defined today, we will swallow the hook and be taken out of the fight. The battlefield is not the world or human history, and the goal is not somehow defeating some enemy with human talents and heroism. A particularly pernicious lie is that there will be some final battle here on earth over Palestine. To some degree The Cabal seems to believe that, but they are utterly wrong. Dispensationalism is one of the favorite lies of The Cabal. The battlefield is not literal turf; it’s your own soul and victory is simply opposing your fallen human nature. The greatest ally of that evil nature is misdirection, the tendency to focus outward to other humans. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against dark powers in the Spirit Realm. Even our metaphors are all wrong. One of the most important battles is to reclaim the epistemology of the Bible, something The Cabal has rejected for itself.

It’s The Cabal that’s beating a dead horse; don’t get involved in saving something that can’t help your mission.