God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time, it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side."
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1944
"It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all — but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons. It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. The Market is not omnipotent— yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum.
The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament—not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals."
Harvey Cox, The Market as God, March 1999
"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism
“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them.
It wasn’t God who was dead. We were."
Ray A., Practice These Principles
To whom does our Lord address his stories of how people reduce themselves to beasts, and damn themselves to the abyss, for so little.
Not the person whom one consider a deviant, a lowlife, less than human, some dirty foreigner, a heathen like the Pharisee thought in the temple, while looking with the hypocrisy and the delusional self-righteousness of pride at the tax collector, who was repenting of his sins..
This is a good time of year to step back, and try to look at ourselves as we are. And not to presume on a father whom we have come to feel free to use and abuse for our own purposes, as we would like to do to everyone else.
The hour grows short. And then we will see things as they are, and not as our vanity imagines them.
Stocks were slumping today as expected. This is classic bubble 'wash and rinse' action.
Gold and silver held up much better than we might have expected.
But those holding new contracts often get a 'gut check' on the next trading day, depending on how the thrashing of the market had gone.
VIX popped higher, as is the usual thing when it hits that lower moving average.
Hate is hate, anger is anger, greed is greed, and murder is murder, despite the lies we tell ourselves, and hold close to our hearts.
“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them. God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason." Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 1963And there is no more certain outcome, more inevitable than for each of us, than when we will face our God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every one of his creatures.
And then we will see the strength and quality of our presumptions, and the vain imaginings, which god it is that we have served. The God who is love, or the god of our hardened hearts.
Have a pleasant evening.
