Recently I spotted a couple more stories about archaeological evidence of previously unknown civilizations, or those that were far more developed than is currently acknowledged. Indications of highly advanced technology, though surely of a different kind than our own, offers no problems for me. As a solid Bible-believing man, I’d be the first to tell you that history is hardly restricted to what the Bible tells us. I feel no need to try squeezing those discoveries into the picture. At the very least, we have no way of knowing what the Flood washed away, but the Bible is far more relaxed about reporting time passage than we are.
That in itself should highlight something: Western materialism is a total anomaly in human history. Our dogmatic literalism in communication, in pursuit of precision that seems missing from everything before us, serves to ensure we will never understand what men did in the past. We’ll stare at the ruins of grand marvels of achievement and never understand how or why such things were done. It’s not simply that those civilizations left us nothing else of their passage through human space. It’s that our civilization has no idea how to think or see by comparison.
Every time we’ve been able to discover anything at all pointing to an intellectual content, we are shown how all other civilizations have shared something we lack. So far as we can tell, only the West lacks mysticism. Even where it appears in Western literature, it is not at all the same thing. We are so utterly bone-headed about it, we think it’s just a higher intellectual pursuit that tends to come out like gibberish, and lots of irrational nonsense. Funny how all Western mysticism seems just that and seems to revel in it. Yet every previous civilization held mysticism in a much higher regard as essential to understanding the universe, and all those other kinds of mysticism were nothing like ours. It is we who lump their gold in with our dirt. In our mythology, everything that isn’t concrete falls into the slough of suspicion.
In Western mythology, it’s not possible for serious thinking and knowing to include sources outside sensory data and reason. All external inputs are lumped together as unreason and sentiment. Western reason dismisses the existence of anything higher than the intellect. And that’s why the West cannot hope to last much longer, and will never accomplish anything that leaves constructive marks that future civilizations will wonder over. Whatever it is that might be possible in our universe cannot be perceived with mere senses and logic. It requires learning how to read the stars, as it were, without the hokum.
Yes, it’s very easy to claim access to the divine. Even Westerners know instinctively there is something out there beyond the mind and beyond our universe, despite the vast effort to dismiss it. So it leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of hucksterism that only seems outside our pitiful science. Utterly lacking a genuine academic approach to higher sources of understanding that reason cannot control, we deny ourselves something God granted to all humans despite the Fall. Every other civilization before ours had tools and a lore of serious academic study of things higher than mere reason. Without the essential tools to work with those sources above man’s perceptions, we have no hope for ever touching anything that will outlast us. All our theories about the ancient monuments still standing will ever fall short because we refuse to acknowledge the very intellectual background on which all those mighty works were built.
And for someone like me who once sought to serve in the pulpits of various Christian organizations, I’ve long since shaken their dust off my feet for this very reason: Mainstream Christianity precludes the very intellectual grasp necessary to read the Bible. Even when they talk about “spiritual needs” they discuss it in terms of more intellect with some allowable emotions mixed in; there is no indication they have a clue that it means radical departure from everything they know. Though I hunger for the fellowship of like-minded believers, we are so few and so thinly scattered, it seems online is the only way we can meet. So be it. Welcome to the fringe of reality, brothers and sisters.
