This post is a bit long, so I won’t blame you for skipping it.
The only questions that matter start with moral truth. I’ll keep hammering this issue over and over, that all truth is a question of morality, not a pursuit of mythical objective reality. God can alter reality on His whim and has a record of doing so. It’s not as if He can’t plan ahead or can’t anticipate our idiocy as humans, but sometimes it’s necessary to remind us that He is in charge of this little project we think of as our universe. The question is fundamentally moral. It’s in our best interest to reach out with our whole being to His moral character, whatever His motives might be.
Thus, our mission is rooted in learning to see past our fallen natures and observe the world through eyes of moral perception. As always, that means consciously discarding our cultural morality myths and pursuing those God revealed. A critical element is discarding our Western bias for false dichotomy. It’s all narrative. Everyone talking at us, whether they know it or not, is trying to create in our minds a moral imperative to join them on some crusade. Too often, they have no intention of marching to the end with us, only get us going down some path they’ve chosen for us.
A given individual researcher will always have biases. Sometimes the biases work out in our favor. Rare is the researcher whose narrative seems consistently in favor of simply finding the best understanding and having no dog in the fight. Often it’s simply a matter of recognizing biases and avoiding this or that narrator on a particular issue.
Sometimes it’s most important to notice the competition between narrators and their stories. In many cases, the competition is only apparent, in that the competition is the narrative itself. Quantum moral reasoning recognizes multiple levels of moral objective, and simply buying into the most obvious meaning is the trap.
We could pick any number of current issues that clamor for our attention, but today I’m singling out the tragedy of Malaysian Flight MH17.
We all seem to have some grasp of the wider background story, that a rowdy political upheaval ran the previous government out of town and took over. The current government of Ukraine appears to be a badly divide junta funded and provoked by Western nations in a naked political agenda to isolate Russia, by yanking away a major asset and pulling it into the NATO orbit. Crimea was the first and most successful rejection of this new state of affairs, but some other eastern districts of Ukraine are attempting to follow the same path. The warfare between the central regime and the rebels, though brutal, frankly seems only halfhearted. We are given the impression that the rebels are hard pressed, but that the central regime isn’t so determined as they claim, perhaps because they suffer their own serious internal instability. Meanwhile, it’s fairly clear the NATO sponsors on one side, and the Russian sponsors on the other side, are fighting a proxy war of sorts.
Not long ago, a casualty of this conflict was a civilian airliner, apparently shot down over Eastern Ukraine.
If you read the likes of What Really Happened (WRH) you’ll typically find a chaotic mixed bag on some issues, but on MH17, the consensus is in favor of the idea that Ukrainian fighter jets shot it down as a false flag operation to smear the East Ukrainian rebels. I note significantly officials of that regime have seized a major source of evidence from the air traffic control facilities, which traffic control MH17 was obliged to obey. First WRH claimed that the Ukrainian regime had more of the Buk missile systems than the rebels did, which everyone believed was the most likely means of shooting down the airliner. Now WRH seems to be pressing the theory it was shot down by fighter jets that were known to be trailing the airliner.
The WRH narrative is part of a larger self-echoing narrative reflected in many alternative sites. This against the mainstream story that the rebels must have shot it down with a Buk missile system supplied by Russia. There were arguments between these two major narratives about whether the Ukrainian rebels even had access to such a thing, but that issue seems resolved in the tacit admission they certainly could get them easily enough, if only by capture from the incompetent regime forces.
I want to call your attention to something: Why does the argument seem so inconclusive? Have you noticed how much attention is given to demands for a fair and impartial investigation? Notably, the demand comes most loudly from those least likely to be impartial. It seems the evidence presented by NATO voices is carefully calibrated to be no better than what the Russians have offered. Meanwhile, there is more noise about the debate than about the actual incident.
For now, I tend to go with this narrative. I hope you’ll find plausible my claim to have no dog in this fight. My point is that it’s hard to find in either the mainstream or alternative press much of the evidence presented at that link, at least not as a collection. We note the site is largely the voice of a Russian oligarch and a political enemy of Putin. However, they have been careful to note the whole thing was one huge accidental mistake, not the direct result of malice on either side. It’s anti-Putin, not anti-Russian. Meanwhile, the incident has become valuable fodder for the propagandists, which is the whole point here. Neither NATO nor Russia stand to gain a thing from offering a factual account, so they won’t.
Along with this is a horde of other apparently disinterested parties waving the horrors of economic war, nuclear war, etc., arising from this renewed NATO-Russia conflict. It’s not as if there is no tectonic shift in trade and currency exchange coming, but you have to wonder: Why all the noise? This is just part of a much bigger mess, with incurable plagues, nuclear reactor disasters, environmental pollution incidents off the scale, earthquakes, climate shift (in both directions), and more that we simply don’t have time to read about.
A part of me wishes ardently that I could find some way to get inside the system that feeds us all this crap. Right now, I don’t trust anyone who is or claims to be inside it. If someone were inside and able to report honestly, I tend to doubt their message would get out without serious marginalization hindering it. Those who do try to spill the beans seem too obsessed with their own fortunes, so their information is packaged and sold with all the hype you get from the system in the first place. The only free access seems to be echoes through the obviously biased narratives already in place.
Let’s pray that Our Lord sees fit to raise up someone who can work within the system without being seduced, someone who can afford to report honestly in some way without the need to make a fortune from it. There is a need here; we are facing a certain tribulation with no accurate assessment of the moral implications of the various narratives. It’s not so much a need for a factual analysis of specific current events, but a moral discernment of the broader picture, a vision of genuine shepherd guidance. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a voice like the Apostle John and his Apocalypse, but written in our language? He used Hebrew symbolism to prepare Christians of his day for the coming persecution and hijacking of the organized churches. (Note: “Apocalypse” is the name of the book; it’s the story, not the event.)
Finally, I don’t pray for things I’m not willing to do myself. Sure, I’ll volunteer for what it’s worth.
