HURRICANE HELENE

       With the New Right descending further into Woke Ideology, the New Left rushing headlong towards Techno-Fascist tyranny, and the average Ameroboob blissfully sinking into effete oblivion, along comes Hurricane Helene to remind us all of two important things about actual Reality:

      1. The Globalist Elites don't care one whit about anybody outside of their clique; and

     2. Ultimately we are dependent upon a Power higher than them and dependent upon our God-given Reason and responsibility for our own lives and well-being. 

    Self-righteous Churchians and smug Atheists of today really don't understand the second point. Both are fixated on the idea of God as a capricious Tyrant who 'judges' humankind by outbursts of Divine Wrath. This is a notion that is a holdover from the days of corrupted religious institutions which melded Religion and Government---a curse that we've never fully escaped. 

   In prehistoric times, religious leaders taught to the people through metaphors and similes, these ancient people never having developed the art of writing (or if they had, it has been lost to us). The similes and parables that they drew upon were natural symbols of Divine Eternity and Majesty, such as the life-giving Sun, the powerful and mysterious mountains, ancient forests, etc. Over time, some learned that the Sun and other stars moved according to natural principles and that mountains and forests held significant natural resources. Instead of sharing this knowledge with the people as further proof of God's Providence, they shared it with powerful warlords (later to become kings and monarchs) and pretended that they themselves had power over these natural phenomenon. People were taught to worship the objects rather than the Creator and that the occasional aberrations in Nature were signs of disobedience to king and priest; whereas before their more enlightened ancestors simply took them as part of Nature. 

    There was some pushback in the Ancient World; in our hemisphere there were the Greek and Roman philosophers as well as the Hebrew prophets. (In the East, the pushback took the different form of religious reformation: i.e. Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, etc: these movements however were aimed at modifying the church-state relationship rather than emancipating the individual to realizing his God-given potentials). Jesus, and to some extent, Mohammed taught the individual relation was to God alone, but the institutions which arose after them solidified the old systems and the Divine Right of Kings held sway in the Christian world for over a millennium and in the Islamic world largely still does. 

    The idea of collective punishment comes from the church-state ideology; as does its secular concomitant, that the State is responsible for solving everyone's problems. However, natural disasters---and certainly man-made ones--- are not Judgements from God. God may work through disasters to bring good, but He doesn't cause them.

    It's noteworthy that both the Old Testament prophets and Christian teachers would confront wrongdoers and the latter would pronounce judgement upon themselves. This gave them the opportunity to repent. In this way, God doesn't 'judge' us as the term is commonly understood, like a legal inquisitor in a modern courtroom drama. We judge ourselves ultimately, because the spirit cannot hide what it truly is.

    Traditionally, Christian doctrine taught that the consequences of sin in the Afterlife was eternal separation from God. Metaphorically, these are described as the physical torments of Hell; but what these metaphors convey is the torment of a soul confronted with its own evil. Jesus' simile of sinners being cast out into outer darkness is closer to the real concept. Think of evil as something like a whirlpool, where continuance in evil deeds turns downward in an ever-tightening spiral until the soul reaches the point of a completely godless self. Despite its glamorization from Hollywood deviants, this what actually comprises the Kingdom of Satan and about the only thing that the media producers get right in the whole scheme is that those members of Satan's Kingdom freely chose to take up residence there. 

   I'm not going to attempt here to explain the Mystery of Evil, far greater minds than mine have tried and come to no conclusion. However, it is obvious that we live in a world where the confluences of Nature and the evil actions of men can and do occur for whatever reason. The question that we should be asking ourselves is how God would have us respond to others in need rather than pointing fingers or pontificating on the reasons why.