The Inverters

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! -- Isaiah 5:20

You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, How have we wearied him? By saying, Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them. Or by asking, Where is the God of justice?  -- Malachi 2:17

They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean. -- Ezekiel 44:23

Right and wrong.  It seems simple enough, yet there seems to be much disagreement about the distinction.  The proverb says that there is a way that seems right to a man but it ends in death.  We are told that a man’s ways seem right in his own eyes.  The satanic admonition is, “Do what you will”, and it is being embraced by more people as the deck of the world tilts, perhaps disastrously past the point of recovery. 

Elements of Islam exult in blood, death, and mayhem and call it “holiness” and “righteousness”.  People seem to have lost the seemingly obvious understanding that, if it right to resist oppression, it is wrong to oppress others.  Even here in America, we have segments of the population voluntarily shackling themselves to the state because others who looked a little like them were shackled involuntarily in the past.   

Not to say that I am speaking for God, but I am certainly wearied by the constant whining about justice from the unjust.  How is it just to get more than you give?  How is it justice to demand from another what you are not willing to do for another?  Here’s a word for all the complainers out there – a man rejoices in overcoming a disadvantage.  A man looks for the heavy end and the hard row.  Knock a man down and all you do is make him tougher to knock down the next time.  I am more than a little tired of racists telling me I’m racist, of the intolerant telling me I’m intolerant.  Get the beam out of your own eye before you tell me about the speck of dust in mine. 

Guess what?  Darkness and evil are dark and evil.  Filth is filthy.  Stupidity is stupid.  Bad is, simply, bad.  You want somebody to wake up, get yourself an alarm clock.  You want “respect” while you think you have a right to shock, offend, and insult others?  It is not going to happen.  Those intent on bringing down the edifices of western civilization and free market capitalism for alleged sins, past and present, will find their positions, power, and privileges fallen among the ruins.  When you have picked clean the bones of the goose, it is rather foolish to expect more eggs.  

But what is true of the slackers, lackers, and whackers, is true also of the exploiters.  Greed is a sin and an ugliness that looks just as bad on the clingers as the graspers.  A thug with a computer and a government mandate devaluing the dollars in my bank account is no different in essence or effect from a thug with a knife stealing my watch.  Impoverishing the working citizens of a nation or group of nations for the sake of too-big-to-fail financial institutions is a crime.  Governments do it because those financiers are their partners in buying the votes of the slothful who prefer a life of meager leisure and self-pity to responsibility and effort. 

It is a shame that Romney walked back on his “47%” statement.  I don’t know if it is actually 47%, but there are a whole bunch of people who think the world owes them a living, who think it is clever to eat the seed corn, to live only for today.  When Jesus tells us to take no thought for the morrow, it is in the context of seeking the kingdom of God and the righteousness of God, of living a life of goodness, wholeness, and self-forgetfulness.  The Lord gives no endorsement to waste, to wantonness, to extravagance, irresponsibility, and self-indulgence.

There are people who get down and need help getting back up.  There are a few people who are born weaker, physically or mentally, that need someone stronger to come alongside.  Oddly enough, we often see those people with handicaps and disabilities working in appropriate positions, living lives of service and productivity with few complaints and very little self-pity.  There are those, as noted in my previous post, for whom we ought to do good when it is possible for us.  But we should be guided by the absolute principles of right and wrong, of light and darkness rather than the inverted and perverted systems that so often control the world. 

I was reading an article the last couple of days on the decline of organized religion in America.  This is celebrated by some.  The comments on the article were generally along the lines of such a decline being inevitable and a good thing lest the nation be taken over by raging Christian fundamentalist theocrats dedicated to the eradication of pink oxfords and back-waxing.  Some said that religion is for those too weak to endure the thought of death being an ultimate and permanent end, that life just is – a meaningless whorl in the cosmic chaos.   We as humans ought to be “brave” enough to face that fact without crutches.  We leave aside the question of how one is supposed to know this is true since truth in such a system could not exist, not even the truth that there is no truth.   We see minds that are lost in the most basic sense.  Not only do they not know how to get to the destination, they deny there is a destination. 

The human mind and human senses seek a pattern.  It is instinctive and irresistible.  We see a face in the shadows on Mars.  Does that mean that we are drawing a god, a creator, a pattern out of what is actually randomness?  It could be.  But every hunter knows the eye occasionally mistaking a rock or a stump for a deer does not mean there are no deer in the woods.  We are looking for something that is there.  The evidence of its existence is the human mind itself.  Deep calling to deep.  We are looking for a reflection of ourselves in nature, in the mountains, in the seas, in the stars. 

Of course, we can use our amazing pattern-recognition skills to find processes in nature -- the machine within the god.  There is nothing wrong with that unless we deceive ourselves into believing it is an ultimate truth rather than a derived one.  We can impose our own pattern.  That is an idol.  It is an unclean thing, an image of bitterness and emptiness.   

Or, we can accept the revelation of God beyond our images after Whom we ourselves are patterned.  Those who reject revelation are trapped in an inversion of values, forever bound to the temporal and the transitory, enslaved to their shadows.  Freedom, eternity, truth, good, light – they are One, and this we seek.