You aren’t cynical enough.
Seen on Facebook today: two contrasting images vertically stacked proposing to offer some moral lesson. The top image was a trio of pubescent white girls facing the camera and tamely clowning a bit. The bottom image was bottoms — three apparently Hispanic girls with well-developed derrieres almost mooning the camera with skin-tight clothing, and one turning back to flip the bird. Text had been added to note the top image represented junior high girls of a previous age and the bottom image as those of today.
You can imagine how the top girls went on to college while the bottom girls were probably pregnant before high school. That was surely the message conveyed to some, at least. Let’s skip the possible racism and consider something: Who wins? I suppose if you care about material prosperity first, the top picture is “good.” If you don’t care about Western Civilization much then the bottom picture isn’t so bad.
In my recently published novel, I intentionally left out noting at what age Harp got married to Gregory. I was promoting a value system that leaves the question with the girl and her family. They were fortunate enough to live in an enclave, away from the dominant society. Instead, these insiders lived with an entirely different cultural milieu, which was the whole point of the book.
By the way, I let slip in the novel that these folks were a mixed race bunch. Harp’s mother was Hispanic and her father was a “mutt” who doesn’t appear Caucasian. Significant figures in the story are Asian and African. I carefully avoid the whole question of where the story takes place aside from somewhere on Planet Earth. The idea is not to promote the bogus “diversity” of post-modern Western society, but to avoid the whole thing by offering ambiguity. It’s just enough to avoid letting anyone assume it’s a white thing or any other kind of thing. It’s just people.
My whole point is that morality as defined by God cannot be associated with any particular ethnic background as we view ethnicity today. That includes the views of both racists and so-called liberals. Both approaches are entirely wrong because they both assume a whole collection of damned nonsense, a mythology that assumes a European standard. Liberalism in that sense is not radical enough because it still builds on the same prevailing assumptions; it’s a mere reaction with no content of its own.
Let’s get really radical and reject the entire civilization.
Holiness and genuine spirituality place you in a high tension between our deeply horrifying context and the pull of God Almighty to a different world. It’s a radically different world even when we are talking about this plane of existence alone. We expect most of humanity to reject our message before we even open our mouths. Even when we do nothing the Spirit radiates from our beings a Presence that demands repentance. Our mere awareness of the Spirit Realm invokes an uncovering of the veiled demonic presence around us.
Isn’t that miracle enough? Do we have to surrender to the materialistic whining about how God does or doesn’t provide this or that dream of our fleshly selves? Stop demanding that God slap down for you clear-cut and precise logical answers to all your questions. The awareness of human need does not equate to real need, and need does not equate to a mandate for God to act. His vast supply is stored up for His glory; if there is no divine “need” then there will be no miracle. Only when you begin to see with eyes of the Spirit do you begin to understand what all of that noise means or doesn’t mean.
The difference between skinny white teeny-boppers who grow up to be educated middle-class working wives in the suburbs versus Latinas with early babies in the barrio has nothing to do with morality as God defines morality. Both are equally unlikely to catch whatever dreams they chase because both are chasing the wrong dreams. Nothing of this world can satisfy the longing of our souls. God and His rich provision is wrongly defined in both of the societies represented in that picture, as well as in all the other subcultural worlds built on Western mythology.
Conventional morality of any flavor is immoral. In broad general terms, there is not a single society today that adheres to God’s ways. Everyone seems utterly convinced they are doing so, but God Himself says they are wrong. What we have is varying flavors ranging up and down a scale that varies between mostly wrong and totally wrong, but nothing closer. I’m afraid my imaginary enclave in the book remains fiction.
Speak the truth and stop buying the popular myths.
