Author: toseealife

Friends or Family?

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Well my family has left for vacation, and I am staying at home.

I’m not completely alone, my grandma is still here.

This is going to be the longest I’ve gone without seeing my family. Three weeks. It will be hard, my siblings and I are each others’ closest friends.

We spent our last full day together with another friend, and then watching our favorite anime together, (it’s My Hero Academia if you’re wondering.)

One thing we talked about in passing was how we’ve had difficulty befriending someone we know, and it seems like they don’t really want us to.

I pointed out that church (where all but one or two of my friends are) is supposed to be family, as the bible says, but if you look at how we’re instructed to behave to each other, it sounds more like friendship.

Proverbs even says better is a friend close then a brother far away, and there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Then I pointed out that we three have always been family, and we have always related to each other as sisters, but that it was only the past 5 years or so that we chose to also become friends.

Up until 13-14 I’d say, I treated my sisters like sisters. People who annoyed me, and who I could annoy, with no fear that it would end our relationship. There is a security in a healthy family, room to grow up and develop, while making plenty of mistakes along the way that family blows off, while it would end most friendships.

Of course, the biblical way to treat siblings is nothing like that, but as most adolescents, I didn’t care.

But after returning to Christ, I began rethinking how I acted. It didn’t change a whole lot until my sisters did the same thing, but overtime we began to build our relationship into something very strong. We enjoy it now. We enjoy each other’s personalities, and we are our closest confidantes. We have the kind of sibling-hood you read about.

And sometimes that amazes me, because I know it didn’t have to be that way. I’m so glad we all chose to become friends. (There’s actually a show on Disney Channel that addressed this idea, Liv and Maddie, “Sisters by birth, friends by choice.”)

I was comparing it to the Church family. Once you become a christian (as our doctrine goes) you are part of the family. And the basic instructions off the bat are that we accept you as such. overlook you faults the way a family would, and be your support. If we fight, we also forgive quickly.

That’s a family dynamic, a baby Christian needs that because they will get a lot wrong in the first year or so. That’s okay. I did too. And I was raised in Church. You cannot teach spiritual maturity, only exhibit it and hope it will benefit other people. I had my  mom as an example of it for years before I learned to emulate any of it.

A new Christian is only beginning to be a new person. And that makes them immature. We are meant to show grace.

The sad thing, a lot of churches do not even reach the family dynamic. They don’t accept people, they don’t forgive, they don’t support.

This does not mean that it doesn’t work however. The problem with corporate church is that the same flaws tend to creep in as with businesses and charities, many just don’t do what they should because management skills are not adequate.

Which is why I think the church was never meant to be a corporate experience, but there are people who find a way to work the system.

Many churches do find the family dynamic. But what the New Testament instructs us in is far closer to friendship in many ways.

We are not just to support each other, but to find each others strengths and talents, and develop them. We no longer just accept, we are also to correct, to sharpen each other. To hold each other accountable.

Family can do this, but it is something that comes more naturally into a really good friendship. Family can be too close to see the problem. Friends build distance on purpose by having diverse interests, getting space from each other, and so they learn more about the other person because they see them from more angles than if they lived with them constantly.

The church is designed to meld these two dynamics into a hybrid I think only is possible in spiritual ways. It is really difficult to explain until you experience it. My family became my friends. I hope someday to have friends who will be family.

The trouble is, churches can not really support friendship. I have a church that supports family a lot. Better than most places do. But it is still trying to figure out friendship.

A lot of discipleship we do is focused on family, one girl who’d been through their school of ministry even admitted to this. Not a lot of it is focused on friendship.

Yet, I think a lot of what the epistles show us is how to be a friend as well as a brother or sister.

I think in Acts, the apostles already had a family dynamic, but after they started to travel and organised, they had to have friends.

My dad has learned the hard way that family can be heard to organize to do anything if everyone acts as and individual. It takes the build up of friendship, the learning to work with a very different person, to speak their language, that allows for teamwork.

Some families achieve this with seeming ease. My family never had been particularly good at this except in crisis situations. I think it depends on how well the family knows itself.

A lot of friends now are not on this level, thanks to the lack of interaction we have except through technology, but you’ve probably met or known people who still have this teamwork ability. Hopefully you are one of them.

And my whole point to my sisters was that this ability is a choice to develop. That is what makes it different.

We have no choice about our family. We need to accept hem no matter what.

But within the family we tend to have friends. It won’t be every remember, an not the same for every member you do have it with, but there will be the odd person here and there.

I have a bond with family I only see once or twice a year because we are family, but I have a different bond with people I choose to be around and are not related to me except by faith or being in the human race.

I realize a lot of this post may only be interesting if you are a christian, but it was something I had not realized before, and I’ve been in church my hole life. Plus, it’s always interesting to think about social circles like this and how they work.

Plus my real point that friendship is choice, it doesn’t just happen, is one I think many of us need to understand. Myself included. Movies show friendship as something that can happen in an instant…sometimes it can, but I have never found those friends to be the ones I am likely to see the most often or talk to the most… Maybe God in his wisdom reserves the instant friendship bond for a more eternal significance. The people you surround yourself with are going to round our your rough edges, and that’s better for you.

Until next time–Natasha

Speaking of friendship, it is a factor in the book series I am publishing on Kindle, here’s a link if you want to check out the first two installments, more coming once I replace my laptop-

You can also visit my author page and ask me questions about the series if you’re curious about how me and my coauthor came up with the idea.

Thanks for your support!

Aftermath–plus special announcement at the end.

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“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”–C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man.)

I’ve written about this brilliant little book before, but one thing that interests me that I have not really touched on is what happened in the aftermath of it.

The system in England when Lewis wrote that books was followed pretty quickly by America, it was probably already in place in the rest of Europe at the time, at least the countries at the forefront of our minds.

Nazism, the great evil of the War, was leading to the abolition of most men, but Lewis was concerned that what they were teaching schoolboys (and girls no doubt) was going to lead to the abolition of all men, in feeling if not in biological form.

Wise men saw where it was going, but where has it taken us now?

We live in the Post-Modern era. It is rightly called that, if we mean by modern Modernism, which Lewis and his predecessor G. K. Chesterton were both very much concerned with. Modernism was not about being modern in a fashionable sense, like it’s usually used now, or referring to technology or medicine. Modernism was the principles, or lack thereof, of thorough rationality. Which Chesterton showed in his book Orthodoxy to really be irrational.

It is basically materialism, but with odd ideals on top of it, that really make no sense whatsoever if you take the idea literally that nothing has any value except in our own emotions.

But as Lewis pointed out, the men who taught this didn’t believe it themselves. They were teaching values in spite of themselves. The problem is, even if they were better than what they taught, it had the same effect on their students as if they hadn’t been.

My parents, and perhaps your parents generation were the prime victims of this teaching’s first effects.

You’re probably familiar with how psychology got very popular in the 60s-90s, and it still is now. It was beginning before then, but at least in America, it really took off once we began pushing religion aside and needed explanations for all the phenomenon’s sin and human nature used to explain.

We’ve come full circle almost in the pat few decades, we’ve come back to realizing that psychology explains nothing. Now we are looking to physics and other such things, we’re looking to sexuality, we’re looking to race, we’re looking to everything except what originally worked for people: Religion.

My dad had behavioral issues as a kid, and born when he was, he was medicated, put in Special Ed and diagnosed with mental illness, he tried rehabilitation. Like many people of his generation, and ours, he also tried drugs.

It’s strange that drugs and psychology both took off at around the same time. (People can bicker about dates, but a few years or even a decade on the grand scale of time is pretty much the same time.) Both were around before then, but they got popularized, jsutfied, studied, and theorized about. They came to be seen as normal.

Clearly they aren’t the same thing, but strange that the very thing that told us that our dependence on substance was a problem coming from deeper issues did nothing to stop us from abusing substances.

Have you noticed that to highlight a problem in society is no to weaken it, but exposing it makes it become uglier, more used, more prolific, draws more people in.

Exposing it just to comment on it, that is, real solutions are different.

But Psychology did not fix anything, it diagnosed things. Medication could not fix those problems, in face many meds make the problems they treat worse. My dad went off his, and does better now that he did while on them. (Of course, you should be careful about getting off medication, the process is difficult and should be walked through with a doctor’s help. He didn’t quit all at once.)

Now, we live in the information, option generation. In the aftermath of all that identifying, we’ve become clueless about what to do.

Relationships have been diagnosed, studied, and tested; the result? We have a really hard time maintaining even eye contact.

Are they directly related things?

I think so.

Exposing how bad we are at relationships did not help us fix them. It made the revelation overwhelming.

Before, people knew some folks were bad at relationships, but those who were were seen as responsible for their own actions. Since no one thought it was genetically inevitable, people could try to improve, or could be ignored by the general public if they chose to remain unpleasant. Not knowing how deep our mental problems supposedly went, we thought we could move on.

Having it blown so completely out of proportion crippled us. Because it made us think we were powerless to do anything about it.

Doubting our ability to control ourselves is now common phrasing for young people. “That’s just the way I am.”

But we took it further.

It was too depressing to live in that, so we began to take these things that were exposed so that we could not hide them anymore, and we began to say they were not bad, not shameful, after all. Instead they were cool, enlightened, they were our identity.

It’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to have mental health issues, it’s okay to have a disability, it’s okay to do what makes you happy.

Not all the above examples are on the same level of crazy of course, but they all stem from the same thing, a desire to take a shame and turn it into a pride.

In some cases that may be okay. But we’ve gone way, way too far past that line.

I do not blame young people all that much for being so stupid, not really.

When I read books written in the 60s-80s, I often find them depressing.

The infamous Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus was one of the most insulting things I ever read on the difference between men and women. A lot of authors who commented on it were condescending to both genders.

Like our differences can be summed up in quirks. Try it and it fails you, you’ll never find any one thing that makes men and women different other than our sexual organs, if you look only at what we do and what we enjoy and what we hate and how we think. The difference is harder to pin down then that, anyone who tires just makes fool of themselves.

When the explanation for differences was so stupid and limiting, it’s in line with human nature to throw it out and go to the opposite extreme, that there are no differences. That’s insane, but it’s less boring. Youth do like exciting things.

Plus, the new and different aspect is attractive to many people.

If you look at any popular attitude held now, you can trace it back to evolving from an attitude the previous couple of generations have. We have mutated it into something different.

We now speak less of the values they valued, and more of vague ideas about self-fulfillment. But it all make sense, that age of reason led to discrediting pleasure and fulfillment as in our own minds, leaving the young people weaponless to defend pleasure on the grounds o fr eason, the natural result we that young people ignored reason, ignored common sense, and ignored restraint.

Now we have this mess.

IF you listen to how we talked now, it’s becomes obvious. People acknowledge that there are reasons to ear healthy, exercise, and focus on happy things; but then make a joke out of doing none of those things. They laughed it off, but behind the humor, there’s a secret guilt, and a secret bewilderment.

Why, if it is so obvious, do we find nothing compelling about reason? And why, if it is so unimportant, do we make a joke out of not following it that hides a note of serious concern.

We are unsettled. We are drifters. The previous generations removed the foundation of our lives, tried to put a weak one in it;s place, but like sand, it crumbled when the floods of real problems struck again. It was never going to hold up.

But, lacking both  a solid foundation, and now even a sandy one, we have none. Hence our myriad of problems that center around confusion, uncertainty, and depression. Our general feeling of purposelessness.

We now do not have the logical skills to explain why we feel this way, only words of mental illness, social anxiety, and being addicted to screens.

We laugh at it because we have no idea what to do about it.

This, I present to you, is the aftermath of the abolition of Man, our humanity is not gone completely, thanks to God and the preservation of some values even so, but it is hanging by a thread because our defenses are so weak.

We are glorifying our weaknesses because we have been robbed of our strength and glory.

That is what happened. And it turns out, abolishing man’s strength and glory is very close to abolishing man himself, it is good for us that God redeems our weaknesses, or we would have no hope.

But we do have hope. That’s what this blog is about after all. That even dry bones can live again.

It is now almost the third or fourth anniversary of when I started it with just that premise. And I still think that  a return to truth is the only way to preserve hope.

So, with that in mind, until next time–Natasha.

Announcement:

I have now published the first two parts of a series I wrote on Kindle!

It is about superheroes, mystical creatures, and mysteries.

There may be over 20 parts in all, at 0.99 an installment (lowest price possible), if you would like to check it out, here’s a link to find it, the series is called “When It Started.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=When+it+started+Natasha+Queen&rh=n%3A154606011&ref=nb_sb_noss

Passengers

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I just watched Passengers.

My reviews would probably be better if I saw these movies when everyone was still interested in them, but that’s what happens when you’re on a tight budget.

I find Space Movies weird. I like Interstellar, I watched Gravity one time, but there’s always a surreal feeling to it.

It’s the opposite of Star Wars, which makes space seem more normal to be in. These movies really empathize how weird it would feel to be in space.

It’s odd, because C. S. Lewis’es idea of space is that it is full. Vibrant. Not an empty vacuum.

And his idea, while seemingly ridiculous at the time, has now some scientific basis. Scientists think space is filled with kinds of matter we can’t identify. They are not sure what it holding everything together anymore. It just is.

Since they aren’t allowed to say God anymore, at least in secular textbooks.

One of the most annoying things about my astronomy class was that every time we got to something that couldn’t be explained, we were not allowed to say God.

Just like in this movie, when Jim is railing at the universe, he is not allowed to call it God.

Yet, the Universe has a sense of humor? How can a thing have a sense of humor?

You might just as well call it God.

If you look for God in nature, you will find Him. You may not find Him quite like how the Bible would describe Him, no one should take Nature as the ultimate authority on God’s character, Nature is fallen, like mankind, and subject to sin and destruction. That’s what Romans would tell us.

Christianity explains why Nature is both cruel and kind, light and dark, creative and destructive, wise and yet senseless. It’s because it reflects us, the same battles we find inside. Why we use nature for analogies, like having “stormy” feelings, or a “sunny” personality.

Space movies (and books perhaps) seem to capture the human feeling of being lost and overwhelmed by what we find around us. Yet, what we find is beautiful, terrifying, and full of wonder.

Without a personal touch, it seems empty and meaningless.

It’s not much of a stretch to say Passengers mirrors the Adam and Eve story, though it also adds the redemption story to it, self sacrifice, and the power of choice.

A chosen fate seems more bearable than one forced on us.

I don’t know if discussing Jim’s earlier actions in a moral light is what I want to do, they were bad, but not entirely unexpected. The important thing is, once he actually learned to love, he made the right choice. The same with Aurora.

The tree symbolism brings the Garden of Eden story into play too.

The message of the movie seems to be two-fold, that nothing happens without a reason, and that paradise is where you make it. That Love makes the difference between heaven or hell on earth–or in space.

I do not agree 100% with  the idea that we can make our own paradise, but I do agree that love makes even a bare spaceship into a garden of life, and that was a fitting way to show it.

It takes both the higher purpose of saving all the other people, and the smaller choice to stay with the other person to make the redemption complete.

A good metaphor for life, in it’s way. Two people united for the good of all is what marriage is meant to look like, and certainly what I hope mine will be.

It’s a sentimental movie, but that is by design. Not sure I would watch it again, I do not like sad stories, but it was worth checking out.

A closing thought from G. K. Chesterton: The only way to feel at home in the universe is to also feel like a stranger in it. (I paraphrase what he says in his book Orthodoxy.)

You could say, through this world, all of us are just passengers. On our way to either the worst possible disaster, or paradise. Our choice.

Until next time–Natasha.

The Cruelty of God–2: Polaroid

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I talked about why God has the right to take things, but this does not exactly answer the question of whether it is cruel for Him to do so, only that it is not wrong.

And there are multiple reasons. But for the kind of thing I was talking about, the thing most precious to you, there is an answer that no one likes, but everyone needs to hear.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way human beings tend to love things. While thinking about it, I started thinking of the song by Imagine Dragons, Polaroid.

If you haven’t heard it, the lyrics go like this:

“I’m a reckless mistake, I’m a cold night’s intake, I’m a one night too long, I’m a come on too strong.

Chorus: All my life I’ve been living in the fast lane, can’t slow down I’m a rolling freight train, one more time gotta start all over, can’t slow down I’m a lone red rover.

I’m a hold my cards close, I’m a wreck what I love most, I’m a first class let down, I’m a shut up, sit down.

I am head case, I am the color of boom, that’s never arriving, yet you are the pay raise, always a touch out of view, and I am the color of boom…

Chorus

I’m a midnight talker, I’m an alley walker, I’m a day late two face, I’m a burn out quick pace. 

I am a head case, I am the color of boom that’s never arriving, yet you are the opera, always in time and in tune, and  I cat he color of boom…

Chorus

I’m gonna get ready, for the rain to pour heavy, let it fall, let it fall, let it fall upon my head…”

What I noticed about this song was that the man compares himself to a bunch of negative things, and what they all have in common is this idea of falling short by going too far. He can’t stop himself. He’s reckless, too cold, he goes one night too long, he comes on too strong.

The whole image of a fast lane, and being a rolling freight train implies he is stuck on high speed. He even says “can’t slow down.” And when he start all over, he does the same thing. Which is why he’s alone.

Holding cars close implies he also goes too far with secrecy and caution. Leading him to wreck what he loves. Making him a let down, and someone people tell to shut up and sit down because he goes too far.

He then says this had made him a head case. The color of boom imagery ties in to how hard he tries, but int he end he just looks like he’s going to come through, and then he never does.

His frustration is that the person he’s singing to is out of his reach because he can’t get it under control.

The last verse suggests being alone and in the dark, and using up your life too fast.

Then, even more interesting, he compares himself to the other person, saying they are always in time and in tune. They have the self control he lacks, and it makes them beautiful.

Then, on a more hopeful note, he turns to rain. Something that he can’t control, but can save his life. The only thing with more than enough to satisfy him.

How does this relate? I’m glad you asked. (I hope you asked.)

What Imagine Dragons has hit upon with this song is the same thing in “Till We Have Faces” and “Hinds Feet on High Places.” When we love, we go too far, and not far enough at the same time. By not being able to stop and be satisfied, we ruin our chances. (Notice in the song, letting the rain fall on his head is the one time he stops moving.) God does not have that problem.

We cling to everything we can get our hands on. We have that one thing we stake all on, and if it is not God, he is, as that commentator scornfully said, a jealous God.

And only someone who scorned God could not see why He should be.

We destroy ourselves and each other in our mad quest for satisfaction. Or, in some cases, our absolute refusal to be satisfied by anything but dissatisfaction. (Apathy, pessimism, cynicism.) We hold our sins–and our virtues–so tightly, we become slaves to them.

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but it ends in death.” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25.)

God is more than right to call us on this, but He does more than that. He will wrench the thing from our grasp.

If it’s a person, or if it’s our career, or if it is a thing, it usually doesn’t matter. It may not b e a death, it could just be a separation. It could be hospitalization for it. That’s not really the point.

We worship these things, when we should only worship God.

Frankly, it is our desire to have our cake, at all costs, that kills us.

You are addicted to TV, it breaks, you replace it.

My dad used to be addicted to a video game, it would break our computer. The computer would freeze up playing the game, but not doing other things. To us, the hint was clear, but he would just buy a new computer. Not that we could afford it.

I’m happy to say he has quit, but for years it was a problem.

God seems cruel to do this to us. But if he let us live in that, we would put ourselves into our own hell. We want to be left alone to ruin our lives, they are ours right? But God will not leave us alone.

People can hate Him for that, but for my part, I decided a long time ago that I love Him for it, I did not like how life under my idol felt.

When God takes something; sometimes, even often, He later gives it back, now redeemed; purified from our addiction, we can enjoy it for the good it actually was.

But in the end, it is more important to have God himself. And I will not apologize for saying so. The worst time of my life has been when I felt I did not have Him.

Until next time–Natasha.

The Cruelty of God.

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I’ve had this phrase stuck in my head since last night. It sounds blasphemous, but I promise, I have not fallen off the deep end.

This thought has come to me from a few different directions. One thing that started it was a rather nasty string of comments under a Christian Movie review of Left Behind (the terrible 2014 one.)

Commentater: Good question! The Christian God is fond of punishing the sons for the sins of the father, so maybe the baby would just be born in a shit world?

I mean, the Catholic idea of “original sin” is Adam’s sin, which needs to be washed away with baptism. Other Christian denominations think Jesus’s blood solved the whole original sin deal with the crucifixion alone. But 40 years of wandering in the desert was because of the golden calf worship; that’s a definite example of kids paying for their parents’s misstep. (To, ahem, say nothing of the genocides committed by Israelites when God was like “These people don’t believe in me. Feel free to kill them all.”) Even the Christian God brags about it when he’s all “I’m a jealous God, and I will mess up your kids if you cross me.” So yeah, I guess from a Christian perspective I can see that it would be like ‘Let that atheist bitch have her godless kid during the apocalypse; serves them right for not believing!” It certainly fits with the mythology.

Boy, these people sound embittered.
I hope it’s okay to quote them anoyomously, since comments are basically anyoumous. I ahve no idea who these people are.
And I don’t want to attack them personally. They simply sum up an idea I’ve seen before; and I have asked myself, if God is good, then why okay such things?
Even in Christian’s personal relationship with God, he can do things that seem terribly cruel. Just read Job.
The cruelty of God has been summed up by one lady who said “If this is how you treat your friends, I can see why you have so few.”
And in nowhere have I seen it better handled (outside of the Bible) than in that underrated book Hinds Feet on High Places. (I mean, maybe it’s not underrated, it might be too specific to be widely popular.)
In that story, Much Afraid is asked to sacrifice the human love in her heart, a love that it rooted in every fiber of her being, and it hurts terribly to do this.
Another good book for the subject is “The Great Divorce.”Though C. S. Lewis is not one to humor delusion. He shows quite clearly why the things we cling t are bad for us.
But the cruelty of God is simply this:He demands of us what is most precious, and were are most invested in, the very thing we built our life on, staked our hopes and dreams one, and would die for, HE demands us to Give UP…or, if we won’t, often He takes it from us.
Job said “The Lord gave me what I have, the Lord has taken it away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”
I’ll need to split this post int two parts to properly cover my point, so in this one, I will focus on the charge against God and how it might be answered, and the next one, I will lay out why I think God might have a few things to say of us in return that could shift our perspective.
But like all humans, I have a limited view of things, and there is likely more to it than I can say.
So, first of all, the Charge that it is cruel for God to take children or parents away. As made by the commentators above, and millions of other people through time.
Why is it not made by Job? he was not wicked or rebellious against God, God pronounced Him righteous in fact. Satan is the one who accused him, God let Satan take away even his children.
Job says “God gave me what I have, God has taken it away.”
God’s response at the end of Job is much the same. “I made all this, can you make these things? Then why do you question my right to do as I wish with them?”
God in his humility sometimes deigns to explain things to us, but we demand explanations when we should instead just be thankful for them. Why should God have to explain Himself to us?
The simple fact is, God owns everything…so how can he take it?
It is our problem that we stupidly imagine we own anything in this world that he has not let us have.
I don’t expect this to comfort a bereaved person. Only someone with faith already developed can find comfort in this knowledge. But it still stands. For comfort, we must focus on God’s kindness and patience.
And it is there. Few deities allow themselves to be questioned. Most pagans would not dare to do so of their smaller gods. It is because we first do not believe in God, and second, know that he will not strike us for questioning him, that we take advantage of that freedom.
The charge that it is cruel to kill children for their parents sins is somewhat more serious. That has to do with justice, not ownership.
Not many people like the idea that parent’s own their children in the West. Though at the time the Bible was written, it would not have been questioned. Until you were married, you belonged to your parent. Marriage was the great liberator. Boy, how perceptions have changed.
 God later promises that will no longer be the case, but the reason it ever was it a little more complicated.
It has been scientifically proven that some sins or tenancies to sin get passes down to the 4th generations, which is how far God says he will punish. According to the Bible, the unfortunate outcome of Adam sinning was that sinning became genetic. Our bodies carry the mark of it, as well as our souls.
I do things I’ve seen my parents do, you do too, if you have kids, they copy you.
Frankly, God could punish children just as easily for what they do was for what their parents do. God does not punish innocent people, but if you are already guilty, then family guilt will be added to personal guilt, and in the end, which it is does not matter nearly as much as we pretend it does.
God does not say he will kill the children for their parents sin, by the way. Frankly, no one even in our present time would think it strange if the child of a known criminal or tyrant tried to make amends for what their parent did, we would think it stranger if they didn’t care. And in some cases, the law might even hold them to that.
There were times when children dies for their parents sin. Well, there was two times that come to mind. Only in one case was the child innocent that we know of. And that was David and Bathsheba’s first child.
David does not blame God, he accepts that he will see his son in heaven. It is not, strictly speaking, the child that was punished. David lost the joy of raising him, (he was an affectionate father, we know–maybe too much so,) but the child was not worse off. If anything, going straight to heaven is a reward.
I suppose again, the problem here is if you have no faith, that is cold comfort.
There isn’t much I can say about that. Any defense of God, is first, unnecessary, and second, only sensible if you believe in Him.
Paul said you have to believe that God is and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. That he is good, in other words.
That’s all I can cover now, but in part two I’ll break this down more–until next post, Natasha.

The Snake Cycle.

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Okay, Thomas Sanders, I admit it, you are a freaking genius.

You may not know it, but it’s buried in there.

I was reading  a book by G. K. Chesterton and I came cross an analogy for eastern philosophy’s view of eternity that arrested my attention, because I hear it used elsewhere.

Ironically, I do not think Thomas Sanders, winner of best YouTube Comedian Shorty award (hope I spelled that right), knew exactly what he stumbled on…or Joan, his friend who helps research and write this stuff.

It’s the snake devouring its own tail picture. I did not know it was a real symbol, but apparently it is. (In occult stuff, as well as Viking culture. Weird.)

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I believe, given what I know of odd eastern mysticism, it would mean in that context that eternity flows in and out of itself, it feeds into itself, starting over and over again, regenerating, reincarnating.

Some cultures view time as cyclical, or traveling in a circle, which is why we have repeating patterns.

The biblical view of time is better represented by a wheel that rolls on a line, like the seraphs from Ezekiel’s vision, cycles repeat, but changes and alternations and progress still happen. Time is a vehicle getting us from one place to another. The only way a mortal being could travel without being burned up.

You’ll find the idea in “A Wrinkle in Time,” the 4th dimension is time, which is another way of saying the 3rd dimension is solid objects and the 4th is them moving. The 5th dimension is moving through time, or more accurately, moving time itself. Bending it.

That’s not really relevant to this, except as a concept slightly different from the repetition of the eastern view.  Even they think you reincarnate into better or worse states, as I said in my last post, all religion seems to share the idea of a better or worse end after death. In this case Karma is what decides that.

To be fair, I’m sure there’s nuance depending on whether you’re Hindu, Buddhist, or some other variation of a reincarnation-believing religion that I don’t know about because I live in the West. (Hey, it’s hard to keep track when you don’t live in it.)

But the point is, Thomas Sanders links this odd idea to the idea of losing motivation. He only applies it to creating his videos, but it easily applies to more than that. He actually sort of acknowledges this in other videos about “Why do we get up in the morning?” and “Learning New Things about Ourselves.” Even coming into the more lighthearted “Becoming a Cartoon.” He has a habit of getting existential.

Being the unashamed nerd that I am, I find his philosophy to be the most interesting part of his videos.

If you want to see for yourself, 6:00 minutes in is where the part that really interests me happens. I want to give credit where it’s due.

 

Patton (Morality) describes the creative process as a whole, mushy vision, and the solution to this is Logic. Yet Chesterton points out that a purely logical way of viewing things only narrows your perspective. The creative process may be unclear, but that mirrors how we see life, not always clear on what is happening, but able to see more because we cannot see all, than by trying to fit all into our logical minds.

That leads to a very dark, bleak, panic as Logic in this video discovers, being the solution to a problem he has caused. And those who try to see the world with reason alone find themselves in that  position, as Chesterton elaborates:

“Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether skeptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys himself.” (Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. Pg 47.)

This got me to thinking about the anime I watch. I’ve noted this particular philosophy to be present in it. It’s a common one in anime, and other eastern influenced stuff, it’s also frequently found in the Church. It’s a common idea to men.

That you can, like with a piece of wood, whittle your character down into something beautiful and smooth.

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My Hero Academia‘s eastern philosophy of lopping off all the bad habits and tenancies and honing your skills down to the basics. That you have a basically good nature, with potential, but you need to be trimmed, (it is literally expressed almost that exact way in Best Jeanist’s words to Katsuki Bakugo in Season 2.) It’s basically the same thing. And the same as the materialism which Chesterton is referring to, which by the way, he compares to madness.

The idea that materialism shuts out everything but just the material. It’s literally the definition, but the definition is awful, he thinks, because it is so narrow.

It may encompass the whole world in that it is a world view, but it also shuts out much of the world, anything that can’t be measured by matter. Including our emotions.

My Hero Academia is not that extreme. It certainly has a better worldview than materialism. It’s not completely wrong to think we should cut out the bad things of our lives.

The bible teaches that.

But here’s where it deviates, and I may add, where Thomas’s Logic has to cooperate with his Morality, since he is smart enough to know nullity is not the way:

The Bible says not just to remove evil, but to replace it with good. The idea is not to be some enlightened martial arts master, cut off from all negative emotions, inner peace is not the annihilation of troubling feelings, but the overcoming of them with better ones.

Few people can succeed at shutting off their feelings completely, even depression is a feeling, and those who can are only less able to understand them. But it’s far most possible to overcome our emotions by focusing on better things. OF course, we still deal with the bad stuff, but we do not dwell on it.

I could go for a long time about all the fictional examples of this, and even real life ones, but I think I can leave it here.

Good for you Sanders.

And Chesterton is a genius also.

Until Next Time–Natasha.