Regime Dictionaries in Clown World

Introduction

One of the reasons why an unloving generation can come to think of themselves as entirely loving is they have assumed control of all the essential definitions. They have seized editorial control of the dictionary, which turns out to have been fairly convenient for them. Love is whatever they say it is. For now.

To be sure, there are still rogues and renegades who have kept their copies of the older dictionaries, and many of them have so far eluded capture. But the pursuit is hot, like a car chase scene from an eighties movie. I mean, get a load of this particular action sequence.

But Christians who do not wish to be aligned with official regime theology, which is pagan at root, must be willing to be involved in this. And if you are not willing, you need to be willing for God to make you willing. For if love is not anchored outside the world, there is no such thing as love. If love is not defined from a place of transcendental and everlasting life, there is no such thing as love. If love is not grounded in the absolute, then there is absolutely no such thing.

In Order to Be Itself

In order to be itself, love requires an infinite reference point. As Sartre once observed, without an infinite reference point, every finite point is absurd. This is quite right, but because Sartre denied that there was such a thing as an infinite reference point, he was thereby reduced to the claim that everything is absurd. But of course, he did not act as though that particular salient point he was making was absurd—because it wasn’t—but because it was not absurd, it turns out it kind of was.

The only alternative to such a hall of cracked mirrors philosophy is the confession that there is in fact an infinite reference point, a Creator God who made us all. This God created all energy, matter, space and time, and having done so, He then sculpted Adam from the dust of the ground. The unbeliever scoffs and says “that’s absurd.” At which point we raise our eyebrows slightly, as much as if to say, “you find absurdity to be a refutation?” Remember that these denizens of clown world are hellbent of making everything absurd, and yet they reject the idea of an infinite personal God, to whom we are accountable, as being “far-fetched.”

But because there is in fact such an infinite anchor, Sartre is rescued from the indignity of being a sophistical chatterbox who provided us with a stream of wind and French confusion, and he rises to the dignity of being flat wrong.

God is in His Heaven, and rebellious man bears His image like a brand that won’t heal.

Think About It

When you come to empty a box, you can only take out of the box things that were in it. If you reach into the heart of man to pull out an ethic of love and compassion, you have to account for how an ethic of love and compassion got in there in the first place. Given what is claimed about the origin and nature of mankind by the current editors of the regime dictionaries, you are faced with the challenges involved with trying to unpack an empty box.

Mankind is supposed to be the end product of time and chance colliding with matter, which then careens down the corridors of history together. Man is meat and bones, along with some fleshy parts, and he has no soul, no mind, no spirit—just brain gas that floats off the surface of the chemical reactions going on in his gray matter. As floating brain gas, it means nothing, and signifies nothing. Why should it?

I say he has no soul, no mind, and no spirit. But it does have pronouns.

Having faced these undoubted facts, and having come to the realization that every mother’s son of us is in this position—according to the secularist understanding of the world—I would urge you to then go find some high-flying ethical reasoner, preferably one occupying an endowed chair at one of the Ivy League schools. Put him into a classroom, and assemble all the students, and then they (or their parents) can all pay top dollar in order to spend a semester emptying out the empty box. But don’t forget that it is a prestigious empty box, and it was emptied in a classroom of a university that is very highly ranked by U.S. News and World Report. That particular publication is an authority when it comes to empty boxes, just like U-Haul knows their cardboard boxes, which are also empty.

Every Ethical Demand

One of the things we must learn to do is hearken back to the wisdom we had on the playground in the third grade. When some bossy kid from another grade would come over to our swing set in order to tell us we had to go inside now, we knew the basic questions to ask, especially if we did not want to do as he said. And these are the same questions that lie at the root of all moral reasoning whatever. The questions are “why?” and “who says?”

Make a list of the increasingly shrill ethical demands that beset us every day. Check your privilege. Reduce your carbon footprint. Stop using plastic straws. Fight for reproductive freedom for women. Save the whales. Assume no pronouns. Smash the patriarchy. Topple white supremacy. Fussers of the world, unite.

But no. Why? Who says?

If you, a collection of meat and bones, are being urged, by a globule of avuncular protoplasm across the table from you at Thanksgiving, to stop mansplaining to your six-year-old daughter why she has to eat at least some of her green beans, one of the first thoughts that should occur to you is “why?” And the second thought should be “who says?”

A moment’s reflection should reveal to you that, given the premises, the only possible answers to these two foundational questions are “no particular reason” and a “globule of protoplasm that a particular social convention is pleased to call your uncle.” When he takes you aside after dinner to have a man-to-man conversation about your intolerable patriarchalness, you should realize, with fascinated astonishment, that he is actually wanting to have a moist-robot-to-moist-robot-program-download. There is no such thing as a man anymore, or another man for that matter, or a conversation. It also means, incidentally, that there is no such thing as a moist robot either, which brings us back to the cracked hall of mirrors.

But if there is no such thing as a man, there can be no such thing as mansplaining. She therefore must still eat the green beans.

The Apostle Nails It

Relativism tries to be coy, and so starts out with things that are supposed to be insignificant and minor, but by the end of the process the whole thing becomes a ridonkulous farce. It is as though we gave Dr. Timothy Leary as much acid as he wanted to prepare him for an assigned task of writing a screenplay for the Marx Brothers.

Scales do not weigh themselves. Yardsticks do not measure themselves. And when we assume to ourselves the authority to measure and evaluate all things in the world with standards derived from inside that world, we discover that we have unplugged the world from any possible source of transcendental meaning. When we do that, the epistemic refrigeration unit stops working, and everything in the cosmos starts to melt. In our day, the process is well-advanced, which is why the world around us is starting to look like one of those Salvador Dali paintings.

Things are really dire. But when the whole thing is melts down like this, my only consolation is that the very last thing to melt will be the polar ice caps. A little divine sense of humor thing.

Christ or Clown World

The only way out is Christ. The only thing to do is to repent. Do you want love, a love that is constant and not absurd? Then you must have Christ. Do you want to stop lying to yourself about sex, and pronouns, and feelings, and experts, and evolution, and power structures? Are you tired of it yet? Then Christ is the only possible answer. Christ or nothing. Christ or chaos. Christ or clown world. Christ or the psych ward. Christ or the whole world turns into a psych ward.

The contrast is stark. The apostle John tells us, astonishingly, that God is love. Love is not something that God decided to do one day, but is rather is an essential characteristic of who and how He is. We are not told that God has love, but rather that He IS love.

This is eternal love, outside the world. Not only is this the case, but God is immutably love. He is an unchanging God, without variation or shadow due to change. He is the everlasting God. The mayhem in the editorial offices of lunatic dictionaries does not reach Him. He is not affected by any of that chaos.

So I began by saying that love needs to be anchored outside the world. This is what I mean. God is the living God and He is, by definition, outside the world. There is a Creator/creature divide, and the span between the two is infinite. That span was bridged only once, in a place called Bethlehem.

So God created the world, and He is the great I AM, the living and triune God who is before all eternal times. He is the way He is necessarily, and His nature and character are immutable, and therefore He is immutably loving. Thus any ethical system based on Him will reflect those characteristics. They will not change as though subject to fad or fashion, and the thing they will not deviate from is the constant standard of love.

And this is why the definition of love must not be ceded to the editors of the regime dictionaries in clown world. But there is only one way to avoid that.