Saturday 24 June 2017

Politics

All my life, and certainly ever since I became interested in spiritual matters, I have kept away from politics and regarded it as belonging to 'this world'. And, as a general rule, anyone with his or her mind set on higher things should have no concern with, and certainly not become involved in, worldly affairs. I still think like that in many respects. For anyone seriously on the return path to God the spiritual should take precedence over all else, and everything other than that should be seen in the light of the spiritual.

However I now foresee the time when to stand on the sidelines with regard to what goes on in this world could well be to become complicit in evil. As religion has declined in influence so politics has expanded to fill the void and now it is becoming not so much about how we are governed as what we are. Caesar is invading God's realm as he did during the time of Nero and the first Christian martyrs. The outer is trying to usurp the prerogatives of the inner and everywhere traditional (indeed archetypal) values are being overturned as a result. Clearly when that happens the spiritual person has to take a stand and can no longer position himself above it all.


So, though I still want to have as little to do with politics as possible and though I still believe that this should be the position of all sincere spiritual seekers (the sight of monks and nuns voting has always struck me as ridiculous), when, as now, politics starts to transgress its proper boundaries it may become time to review the situation. If politics is used as a covert means to implement evil (under the guise of good, of course) the spiritual person cannot just stand back and pretend detachment. When the world is a spiritual war zone one has to pick a side. That does not mean a political party. It means to align oneself with good rather than evil, truth rather than lies especially when the latter is disguised as the former.

With that in mind I should like to make the following points. There is an anti-spiritual power in the universe which seeks to undermine traditional institutions based on truth and then turn them on their head so that the original meaning is lost. We might think that original meaning is still there, or even enhanced, because its abstract quality remains but when the form its expression takes is distorted, when it is misapplied, then the principle is destroyed. To take just two obvious examples look at art and marriage. Neither of these are now what they were. Both have been so attacked that their true meaning has been debased. 

The devil always works by making truth lies and lies truth. But he includes enough truth in his lies to make them palatable before undermining that truth and exalting the lie. He has a long term strategy and will start his distortions innocently enough but, when you know how to look, you can see the incipient corruption from the beginning. With feminism, for example, he has attacked the basic composition of being under the guise of justice, fairness and truth. But after some initial righting of wrongs he has proceeded to his true agenda which is to try to make women become more like men and blur the lines between the sexes to the deep mutual loss, spiritual loss, for both sexes. Some see this as an evolutionary advancement and a move towards making us all androgynous which is supposedly a good thing but why are there two sexes? It is not just for the physical reproduction of children. There is a far more profound reason which has to do with love, creativity, beauty in the spiritual sense of all of these.

Besides which life is meant to grow organically, building on the past. Jesus came to fulfil the prophets not to abolish them. Radical restructuring such as this is not part of natural growth. It is revolution not evolution which is not how the spiritual powers work except in extreme crisis when human beings have strayed too far from their intended path. To be sure, there is transformation but that is from one state of being to another. It does not concern movements within the same state of being, in this case the merely human.

It's time to recognise that the real power behind the left has always had as its true goal the undermining and destruction of religion, and this is the germ present in all leftism even that of the traditional sort which was often upheld by well-meaning and God-fearing people but still people in whom spiritual insight took second place to a desire to implement social reconstruction. Thus they were people who basically construed reality in terms of this world and failed to see that this world has context and meaning only in terms of how it serves the next. So even when sincere and personally morally upright they had things back to front. Their legacy is the modern left which has no use for religion at all except insofar as it can be inveigled into its agenda. This is because when religion is not front and centre it gradually gets pushed to the edge and then out of the picture altogether.

The core principle of the left is equality which is a false transposition of a purely spiritual principle to the material world. When applied to the material world it inevitably leads to the destruction of quality and value, both necessarily hierarchical, and that in turn means the destruction of truth. It wouldn't in a perfect world but this is not that by any means. It is a fallen world and currently fallen further than ever before. This was always known by the powers behind the left whose aim was the destruction of the Good as in orientation towards God. It is also probably sensed by many of their human representatives (not all, of course, many are good intentioned people who nevertheless lack any spiritual perception) whose underlying motives, it is clear from history and the present day, are hatred and resentment. I see it as no accident that the left is called the left for that is traditionally the path of spiritual deviancy. If it is countered that maybe left wing people just don't believe in God and do believe in humanity I would respond with St Paul in Romans 1:20-22 that the knowledge of God is inscribed on every human heart.

"For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.


For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their senseless hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools."

None of this means that the right is right. But whereas the right has been corrupted by materialism, greed and selfishness it is an example of something, basically sound, gone wrong, specifically because it has disconnected itself from its roots in religion. But the left is an example of something wrong from the beginning. The right could potentially be reformed if it rediscovered a deep spiritual foundation. The left was wrong from the start because of its worldly focus though it may once have had a corrective or balancing function. Now, however, when it has become the underlying assumption of virtually all modern political thinking (save extremist reactions against it on an exclusively worldly level) its true nature of spiritual destruction should be clear. That it is not to so many people shows how far we are from any true understanding into the purpose of life in this world and the next.


Note: I condemn the left more than the right because it is the left that has tried to remake reality according to its materialistic image. The right has merely followed in its wake in this respect (and it has). Economic considerations are really the least of our worries and hardly the point at all.


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