Who Designed the Designer?

The idea behind this question is that if you say that God created the universe, you must then ask who or what created God. For every cause must have a prior cause. Atheists come up with this  challenge sometimes, thinking they have thereby undermined the thought processes of the religious believer, but it actually shows their inability to think metaphysically. Who designed the designer is a meaningless question because it doesn't recognise the difference between spirit and matter. That is to say, between something that exists in time and space, and something that just exists. God is existence itself and therefore absolute being-ness. He needs no design because of his perfect wholeness and oneness. He is not caused because he is not a thing. He just is. And if it is asked how something perfectly simple can be intelligent, the answer is that God does not think. He knows. His being is his knowing, instant and complete.

The material world is one of cause and effect, and when I say the material world I mean the created world so not just physical matter. This is the world of time and space, movement and change. But the spiritual world or state that gave rise to this is not subject to time or space or movement or change, and so notions of cause and effect do not apply to it. This is why certain ancient teachings can say that being came from non-being. I would prefer to express this as becoming came from being but it amounts to the same thing. The world of cause and effect came from uncaused being. Who designed the designer is a question that can only apply to the world of material existence. It has no meaning in a spiritual world which exists outside time.

A Call to Arms

What we need now is a loud blast of the celestial trumpet, the volume, tone and full-on presence of which will cut through all our self-serving lies, deceptions and hypocrisies, and leave us nowhere to hide. We are sinking in a swamp of illusion because there is no love in us. We may think we are kind and loving because we believe in the fiction of equality (or we are told to believe in it by our betters), but we have no love for truth. You may ask, what is truth?  You will start to know it when you open yourself up to the reality of the transcendent and don't approach life through the distorting lens of the ego.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-call-to-arms.html

Added note: Reading this back it seems rather over the top. My only excuse is that an image suddenly popped into my head of a trumpet blast from the heavens suddenly calling everyone to attention. It was so loud and so obviously not of this world that people on earth were given no chance whatsoever to dismiss it. It showed us all up for what we really are. And I wrote this down without thinking about it.

Evil is Based on Rebellion against Order

Evil can only exist in self-conscious beings which means, as far as we know, humans or angels. Only if you have the possibility of being consciously good can you be actively bad. Evil in the animal world doesn't exist. It's true that you can have a 'bad' animal but that is likely to have a physical or environmental cause. What you might describe as spiritual evil only exists in self-conscious beings.

When God created the world, he saw that it was good. This means it was according to his plan and everything followed its true nature without deviation. Evil, when it came, did not arise through ignorance but through the will. This is the teaching in the book of Genesis and it makes sense. There is an order in creation and to observe this order is to live in harmony with the world and one's own true self. The order is based on the reality of God and includes a natural hierarchy amongst created beings. But free will introduces the possibility that beings can rebel against this order to advance their own agendas. There are several ways in which they can do this but two of the most common are by denying God and by seeking to undermine his order.

I believe that a major cause of evil in the human kingdom is resentment. It's not the only cause. Love of power is another, but resentment is supposed to have been behind Satan's rebellion against God. Pride was involved too and there is certainly a link between these vices, but Satan resented the fact that he was not equal to God and this was the cause of his fall. He rebelled against order because of resentment. This was the first act of evil and it carries on to this day. You may say that this is all a myth but it is a myth, like all proper myths, that describes a truth and the literal reality of it is not important in that respect.

Resentment is a major cause of evil in the world today. In fact, I would say it is the major cause. The serpent incited resentment in Eve, resentment against God and against Adam and against the natural hierarchy that did not place her at the top. The result of that we know. He is doing a similar thing now. He fans the flames of discontent and encourages those who are deficient in positive goodness to rebel.

Evil comes when we deny reality. Reality is God and the natural order of creation. When we deny this, we have given in to evil even though we may find ways to justify our actions. But if we look within our hearts and examine our motives for doing whatever we do, we often find that, while we may claim to be acting for the good, our reasons for doing so are not good. For instance, many political movements are filled with people who think they are trying to improve the world (according to their lights) but whose motivating force for this is really resentment and desire for power.

The archetypal rebellion is often thought to be that of a child against its parents. When a child reaches adolescence, it is quite natural that it seeks to assert its own individuality and break free of parental authority. But we have been duped into thinking that this inevitably means rebellion. It doesn't. Given a wise parent and a basically good-hearted child, the whole process can take place without incident, without major incident anyway. Rebellion is not an inevitable fact of life, either in the context of the parent/child relationship or the wider context of the evolving human being. Only if there is an excessive authoritarianism on the side of the parent or an excessive egotism on the side of the child will it manifest in the family realm. We know that God is a wise and loving parent so our current mass rebellion is not because of him. It can only be put down to our own egotism.

More Brexit

Although there are many people who want Britain to remain in the EU, I don't think their reasons have much to do with love of the thing itself. There are practical and ideological reasons but no one really loves the EU as people love their country. This article on Albion Awakening seeks to explore why.

https://albionawakening.blogspot.com/2019/02/more-brexit.html

Brexit

Notwithstanding the fact that I consider leaving (or staying in) the European Union to be a bit of side issue, all things considered, I've put a few thoughts about it on Albion Awakening. 

What I mean by 'side issue' is that it doesn't really matter whether Britain is in or out as long as we continue with our materialistic way of life. I have no doubt that the EU as a body is antipathetic to any real spiritual awakening because of its imposition of a sort of universalist, bland humanitarianism which it cheekily calls 'European values' but which is actually just a false substitute for real spirituality from which it borrows some of the external trappings. But nothing can change at a fundamental level, which is what it needs to do, without a widespread repentance or metanoia which means more or less the same thing but implies, to me at any rate,  a deeper conversion and greater willingness to submit to the necessary scouring of the soul.

Remember The Creator

I have a book coming out at the end of March published by Axis Mundi. It's called 'Remember the Creator' which is something I was told by my teachers many years ago. Very simple, isn't it? In fact, it's almost trite from a spiritual point of view. And yet it's the key to everything. It's also the key to the ongoing descent into chaos in the world today, a descent that is frequently unrecognised or not admitted to but is intuitively sensed by many people even if the majority don't associate it with a spiritual problem. We have forgotten the Creator. And even when people do acknowledge God, that is often within a worldly context in that he is slotted into a largely humanist scenario or seen from within a religion with that, as an ideology, primary and the living, breathing (spirit means breath) God, secondary. 

When we recognise the reality of God, everything turns around. But I mean really recognise not just give intellectual assent to. Our attitude towards ourselves, towards others, towards the world and towards life changes completely. Our motives change, our purpose changes. Our concepts of good and bad, of truth and falsehood, of beauty and love, all these things change. In a way, we are now foreigners to the rest of humanity, those who still live in the world of illusion, a world in which God has no part and they have complete autonomy over themselves.

This is what the book is about. Here is the blurb on the back cover. 

Remember the Creator is a book about the reality
of God and how to become aware of that reality.

Starting from personal experience, it moves on to look at the
evidence for God’s existence and then considers what sort of God he might be. The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are examined but seen as incomplete in the light of the truth that the deepest level of reality must include the personal. Further chapters discuss atheism, morality and suffering, and how these are to be understood from the perspective of a Creator and his purpose in creating, before the conclusion is reached that any true revival of spirituality in the West should be linked to Christ. Finally, we reflect on the modern world and ask what humanity needs to do to throw off the strong sense of alienation it currently suffers from.

And here are links to its pages on Amazon U.K. and Amazon U.S. where you can, if you wish, browse through some of the pages.

Christ and Liberalism

One of the new arbiters of public morality, that's to say, a female pop star, has recently criticised somebody who taught in a school that refused to accept homosexual students as the worst of all Christians. This is not unexpected from a person of that background. What is relatively new is the seriousness with which this pronouncement has been taken by the media. It shows how far the takeover of the establishment by the left has proceeded. Even if you say that it's to sell copy, which is undoubtedly true, in the past that would still have been a priority but it would not have resulted in such widespread reporting of the incident, with the sub-text that any right-minded person will obviously agree with the pop star. 

Now, I certainly think that to refuse to accept homosexuals as students is wrong as long as they abide by whatever the rules of the school they go to may be. That should go without saying. But that was not really the point being made. The point is the old one of how being a Christian means loving your neighbour and being tolerant (for which read not put up with but be fully accepting of) any differences he might have. We're all one and no one is better than anyone else as regards their 'lifestyle' choices, and most other things as well. 

But this is not what being a Christian means at all. If it were, you might as well say we should love Satan and think his behaviour was also a 'lifestyle' choice, no different, really, to that of Jesus. Christianity means loving God and "if you love me, keep my commandments". That's to say, there are two things for the Christian and both are equally important. There is love, intelligently directed, and there is the law, and you cannot have one without the other. If there was no law, as the pop singer appears to think, certainly in this case, then there could be no sin but the idea of sin is a fundamental part of Christianity for that is what Christ came to save us from, the sin of ignorance of the law, on the one hand, and rebelliousness against it, on the other.

For Christians there are two acceptable states as regards the sexual instinct. There is marriage and there is celibacy. Because the sexual instinct is the strongest we have, its proper functioning is essential, and past societies, Christian or not, have mostly known this and sought to regulate it. But we have jettisoned this wisdom with the result that we are separating ourselves more and more from any spiritual connection. For it is the case that atheism leads to sexual licence and that in turn feeds back into more atheism. It does this partly because it increases identification with the physical body and partly because it accentuates self.

Christians are enjoined to love their neighbour, yes. But they are also enjoined, primarily enjoined actually, to love God. God is truth. If my neighbour flouts truth in his behaviour, which the practice of homosexuality obviously does as it distorts and deforms the creative energy which is a sacred thing,  I should still love him but I do not love his behaviour and am entitled, or even obliged, to condemn that.  Love your neighbour means exert yourself to his spiritual good. It does not mean accept behaviour which will lead him away from God. It certainly does not mean giving sinful and virtuous behaviour equal consideration. That is not love. It is contempt for the good.