Reflections of NZ's National War Memorial Day

In my country today, 25th April, is our national war memorial day. Much patriotic claptrap will be spouted which I wil studiously ignore if I notice any at all. Below are some of my reflections on it all

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When footsoldiers in a gangland turf war are killed no one thinks to honour them. But when the gangs are nations though the quarrels between them are no less absurd than the former  and moreover the violence is infinitely greater we are expected to roll over and call these dead heroes. Not me. It is blasphemy to liken the death of those engaged in the criminal enterprise which is war to the sacrifice of Christ; and it is idolatry to subscribe to that empowering vice of war, patriotism. The nations will be done away with on the return of Christ but each individual will still exist, either with Him or in some other realm. As C S Lewis said. when human souls outlive nations which is more valuable? And until then they are, as Isaiah the Prophet said, merely drops in the bucket. Indeed nations were created after the Tower of Babl incidient as ameans to keep human energies dissipated  lest in uniting real evil walk the world, which will happen in the days of the Antichrist

I am a good citizen only because my God, Jesus Christ, would have me refrain from discrediting His ongoing work by bad behaviour on my part. No nation has the right to claim my heart and mind and as nations have become a religion substitute I hold that the giving of my heart and mind to a nation is the sin of idolatry. The nation that I am merely a member of my accident of birth - my citizenshup is in heaven and  I am a foreigner on this earth (scripture reference to be offered..)  the world will only receive my outward conformity, until they require that I openly defy the Law of God and then they have  a problem. But not me. So l will not be partaking in orgy of self congratulation which is Anzac Day. The fact is when they say "lest we forget," in investing the whole event with an air of sacred sacrifice, honour and loyaliy they have already forgotten the true lessons of war - the squalor, the filth, the obscenity, the utter stupidity and the waste. Thus having not ony forgotten but wilfully ignored the true lessons of war they will of course happen again

My Political Progress

I started life as a Leftist and continued as such for the bulk of my life.

I recently came across as Black American conservative by name of Thomas Sowell. He made a lot of sense but of course what was unsaid, as with all political pundits, is what shows his error - and this on both sides. That is to say each side is very good at pointing out the errors and abuses of the other, but nary a word about their own. Yet I am a generous man: when two sides call the other names I will agree with everyone so see both as being as bad as the other.

But I must agree with Sowell that the function of government is to enforce contracts and maintain civil order. In parenthesis I would add that I at this time regard Welfare as a device for maintaining order. Starving people do riot. Let us not be so deluded as to think that Governments act out of compassion.  Bread and Circuses was always the means and the motive. Nanny State is really Big Brother in drag.

Yet I hold that  anything more  than the above listed as functions of government, being social engineering, is coercive, verges on totalitarianism and is arrogant as well as presumptuous insofar as such measures were decreed by the Left and not the people at large. For in trying to make Man good the Left can only corece Man into being - ie pretending to be - what he is not.

So my enchantment with the Left is breaking down. This video of Sowell did not cause this, but only aided it. I have come to the conclusion after decades of religious legalism that law does not work, indeed excessive legislation is a symptom, not the cure, of the lawlessness it covers

So before any think I am becoming a Rightist, to either condemn or applaud,  let me assure you, the enchantment with Sowell broke when I saw a video of him saying Obama was a Leftist. Being Bush-lite the self styled Great White Hope was nothing of the sort.

And even if I see the Left as Looney - increasingly so - I am not about to join the opposite faction that is bent on imposing its will. I will move to what I increasingly view as the proper christian line- apolitical, the Church standing outside the process and rebuking it prophetically - both side - if the Holy Spirits leads

The Problem of Evil

Some time ago I responded to the question of the problem of evil  by rebuking the implicit self righteous of  the very raising of it. This position I still hold. But the implication may have been gotten that I had no answer to the problem of evil itself, or that I was avoiding the question. This is not the case, so I give an answer here, from a previous post elsewhere.

FWD

the question of why a good God allows evil like the Holocaust came up on an Arts and Letters Daily web page. This was my reply

I will answer the question as to why a good God allows the evil. But the answer is not acceptable to modern man. Man is evil and in rebellion to God. Therefore if necessary God will let man drink the cup of his own rebellion to the bitter dregs. God allows us freedom, and in our depravity we abuse it to promulgate holocausts and the vile like thereof. Most questionings arise, in my opinion from self righteousness. When the Biblical answer is that evil people abuse each other constantly, and respond with hatred to such, or feign forgiveness, and when we are all evil, we cannot blame God for our refusing to seek Him and repent of the very evil he will permit us to enact to its bitter endpoint as a means of showing to us who refuse all other rebuke what we are really made of. With the Holocaust the genie of human nature as it really is was let out of the bottle. This is Man at his most naked. We are this way for we are in rebellion to Him. Do we complain about the freedom we abuse? Do we expect him to magically stop us every time we break his Law even down to the smallest flickering of lust after my neighbour's wife? Or do we seek Him to acknowledge that we abuse the freedom that is intrinsic to His purpose.

We want to reject God, so he will let us go to the endpoint of this that some may see the vileness for what it is and cry to Him for mercy

Some truths hurt not because they are painful in themselves , but because we absolutely refuse them.

END FWD

I will amplify here further

This  above speaks of evil that men ourselves do. As to natural disasters and the general decay and fallenness of the earth, where they are not direct judgements  (itself a notion that modern man finds offensive) I hold them to be indicators that something is amiss and that man should seek for answers. For were the earth still a paradise  we would take this state as some kind of divine endorsement of our behaviour. So we long for peace and have stress and decay. Our inner discontent - for what greedy person is ever content? - is mirrored by decay in the creation, that we may know that our inner discontent is of some real basis.

Thus where evil is disaster or calamity, or even the fact that the gloss is taken off the creation, this God is the author of, as it says in Isaiah 45 - for he is the author of this kind of evil, and He does it to spur men to seek Him. Where we would rest in ungodly rest He would allow discomfort to prompt us to seek them, but he only tears to heal and would amplify our restlessness  that we seek the Sabbath rest of Christ.

Evil is not a problem which disproves the God of Israel. It is the sins of men let to go to their bitter fullness that some might repent, or it is the cursing of the earth that we may know something is amiss  where depraved consciences might think otherwise.

Thus it is only a depraved conscience that blames God for evil for it refuses the freedom of will He hold in such deep esteem that he would damn those who in freedom refuse his grace for the final time  rather than force a phony repentance