I can teach you something, but unless you use it, the teaching means nothing.
It’s not enough to put the mind at rest about the logic of some particular problem and solution. The mind is not in charge, though it wants so very much to pretend it holds the competence to understand and solve the world’s ills. If your “truth” is generated in the cerebral cortex, it’s too easy for someone else with a different life of inputs to come up with a countering logic and argument. When your truth and your answer arises from cosmic moral reality, it’s puts the onus on the mind’s rebellion, the real source of human sorrow.
The counseling profession relies largely on the advantage of mass hypnosis. That is, most counseling advises you to engage in self-training and conditioning. By building a mental habit based on embracing the prevailing social mythology, your behavior at least conforms more or less to social expectations. Any problems arising from that can then be blamed on externalities, but your internal guidance is now consistent with those around you.
I am familiar with the numerous schools of psychology, but virtually every one of them presumes the dominance of the intellect. So the whole thing is based on the interplay between body and intellect — appetites, conditioning and various elements in the mental registry — but they all bluntly or tacitly deny the existence of the heart as a sensory organ and as the seat of the will, much less as the gateway to the Spirit Realm. The various brands of Christian psychology are all just minor variations on this fundamental failure, for much the same reason that virtually all organized religion misses the point. None of them operates from a biblical anthropology.
One of the greatest lies, resulting in immeasurable harm and evil, is the Western concept of material uniformity. The presumption that life is little more than physical particles abiding by certain physical laws breeds the hideous assumption that human variations are mostly the result of malevolence. There is this narrow, thin definition of “normal” based on the unconscious materialism of the West that has done more to please Satan than almost any other thing you can name. What binds us together and defines us as human is not even in range of the intellect in the first place. It’s a fundamentally moral issue. You can approach the truth if you train your mind to accept that level of awareness, but as long as your mind is essentially Western, you’ll never grasp any part of it.
Western materialistic assumptions place the highest value on the material. The only value of life is our existence here in the Fallen Realm. Physical expiry is the ultimate evil. But the whole thing is wrapped around some obscene moral assumption that every life has to justify it’s presence here. While the application of that logic wanders all over the place, the whole mess assumes that there is an ownership interest in our shared resources in the realm of existence. That assumption stands against the ultimate truth that this plane of existence nothing but a pack of lies.
Let’s back up a bit in our biblical understanding. We have to dance around it because precise language won’t work here. We have to use indicative language to raise an awareness of what’s beyond the human horizon. As God created it, this world was utterly beautiful, a gift of grace beyond words. We were granted stewardship and we fucked it up completely. So this round of existence has a terminus, because God has decided that it cannot be redeemed as is. Don’t get lost here: The underlying reality is still God’s beautiful Creation, but there is a layer or element of falsehood superimposed on it that spoils everything. God is going to have to do it all over again, and removing our filthy mess means remaking things. It means a kind of reset that, from our perspective, amounts to dissolving everything down below the level of subatomic particles and starting over. The real problem is us, and somehow the whole curse of the Fall is inside of us, but it affects what God has made. The problem is our connection to Creation, but fixing it would, at the very least, seem to us total dissolution of current reality. The actual reality of what God will do with the substance of this existing universe is beyond comprehension.
No, it will never be simple, but we can work out some implications on our level. We are to treat our existence here as temporary, terminal and of no significant value. On the one hand, we can gain some limited restoration of Eden through the divine moral justice revealed as the character of God. You can get a taste of Eden by peeling back at least some of the layers of the Curse. We can’t remove the Curse in that sense, only ameliorate it. Eden represents for us an image of what the ultimate remake will be. We have to pass through the Flaming Sword of revelation to get back just a vision of Eden. A full reclamation of God’s intention for us will not happen within this reality. Think of it this way: A primary indicator of the Curse of the Fall is our constraints under time and space. Redemption will include a relief from that limitation; we will escape this dimension.
So within all this comes this gracious statement of truth from our dear Sister Wildcucumber: “That’s the lesson Creation teaches me, that each of us, and each creature, tree, weed, microbe, just is. Nothing and no one has the need to justify their existence, we are what we are and no more needs to be said.” Do you see how this negates the entire Western mythology of materialism? We don’t own this universe! We have no valid claim, except in the sense that we are responsible for this filthy situation. But no one has any business acting as if they can demand your compliance with some imaginary justification for taking up space and using resources. Whatever it is Western folks imagine each human owes the world is pure bullshit. This is what I mean when I say some folks have an inflated sense of entitlement. I don’t owe you a damned thing; it’s to God that I owe a debt I cannot possibly pay.
To the degree we humans might be responsible for destroying a “fragile” ecology and making this world uninhabitable, it will simply play into the hands of God’s eternal plans for His Creation. Otherwise, we humans are entirely incapable of destroying anything more than our own lives here. This does not mean that God will not hold us accountable for pollution, for example, but that the stakes are not what most Greenie Meanies imagine. It does not justify watermelon politics: Green on the outside, red communist on the inside. Respect for Creation is rooted in a totally different set of assumptions. You can commune with nature as God’s Creation because of what it once was and could now be, but not as an excuse to browbeat folks into justifying their existence.
Do give full and frequent consideration which of your choices best reflects the ultimate glory of Christ, with an eye to His ownership of Creation. Respect His claim on this world, not any human claim. This is one of those areas where a violent response just might be justified in Christ if someone interferes too much in your mission for His glory. It really depends on how and how much they intrude into the dominion God has granted to you. But you don’t owe them shit in terms of justification, nor any other human on this planet. If they transgress the dominion God granted you for His calling, it is they who must justify something.
If a particular choice brings you peace with God, that is all the justification you need.
