Luc Koch, a very bright and interesting guy who writes the LucTalks substack recently posted this note and since it was pretty clever and on a subject near and dear to me and which I have been wanting to write about recently I thought that it would be a good opening, which is usually the hardest part of writing for me.
One thing that you learn quickly with children is that they are natural climbers. Susannah started walking at 9 months but she actually was quite a climber before that. The sight of basically anything higher than the floor/ground that they are standing on excites and challenges a child.
But climbing down is not the same. This was surprising to me but I have verified it many times with several different children. Climbing up stairs is easy and automatic. Hanging your foot out over empty space with all of your weight above and forcing the knee of the one leg supporting you to bend so that you can gingerly, timidly, set the foot down on a lower step causes all sorts of alarm bells to go off in our heads. And yet we lionize the climber, note how even the neutral term ‘climber’ is inescapably associated with the upward climb. There are no valley climbers only mountain climbers and the whole idea of trying to get lower triggers vague worries of something twisted or perverted.
To bring this back around to our main topic, generally when we think about ‘What is wrong with humanity?’ or society, etc. the ultimate answer always comes back to Adam’s Fall. Everything is blamed on our ‘fallen nature’. But if we look at it a moment we will see that the real problem isn’t the Fall. It is the climb that came before it.
We started out as living human beings. We very foolishly tried to climb to divinity, or a reasonable approximation thereof. And we would up as dead human beings. Just like we were promised we would.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 2
Now, there are various theories about what life was like before the climb and the fall. Maybe Adam had superpowers or his own righteousness or a hot snake wife. Some of these are more ridiculous than others, but at best they are all just guesses. The main story of the event is that a live human tries to climb to deity and the result is a dead human. That is the change. Life to death.1 It is a fall to the original, natural, divinely ordained level of humanity. So, back to Luc.
First off, he hits a lot of points right on the head. The dominant religion in the Western world today is Enlightenmentism. Whatever we think about the history of Satan2 the Enlightenment is the rise of Luciferianism. The reason why I will never believe that the Masons and the Illuminati are secretly conspiring to takeover the world is because they took over the world 300 years ago and although most world leaders are not enrolled in the Blue Lodge or the Scottish Rite etc. etc. what our leaders believe and what we were taught from grade school on up is Masonic, Luciferian teaching3. Egalitarianism, the obsession with personal independence, the myth of progress(personal or societal) with its occult climb to some transhuman goal is Freemasonry and Luciferianism as surely as it is the American and wider Western civic religion. The Science and the Expertocracy are the legitimate children of the Enlightenment, which is to say of Shining Lucifer.
Second, Luc’s explanation of postmodernism is not quite so pithy as the others and a bit more dubious, but honestly postmodernism is so dull and dubious that that’s probably as good as it gets. The only thing that I would point out is that postmodernism only cracks jokes to hide its deep despair. They start by cracking jokes in the valley but as we are learning it doesn’t take long before they start digging graves, and looking for something to fill them with.
Third, Luc has religion dead to rights. It is all a climb and a comparison and they are all basically the same. We argue about which mountain is higher and think that having the higher mountain is something for us to be proud of and hopeful about. But the basic fact of it all that we miss is, we are gonna fall off of the mountain, a higher mountain just means a sorer head. The mountain is the temptation and it is OOOHHHH so tempting. In all of the modern talk of egalitarianism, Equality and the next step Equity, what is really missing is Equilibrium. You see creatures have a natural place that they were made for and if they are below that place their nature has a tendency to pull them back up towards it, and if nature needs some help to put things back in the divine order then the Divine Orderer gives things a nudge and we rise back to where we belong. And if we climb or place ourselves above our ordained place then we Fall and if we climbed high enough then we Die4.
The key thing to see though is that the Fall and the resulting Death are not so much tragedies or problems to be solved. They are divine solutions to the Climb. But, to get to the heart of the matter, Death is the necessary precondition for Resurrection, which we must recover a vision of not as transcending humanity but as true humanity. All climbing is condemned by the Son who descends. You can’t become more like God by climbing because He doesn’t climb5. Our aim is not to become as divine as the Son of God but rather to become as human is the Son of Man, not to climb a mountain to God but to embrace a Bridegroom who came down off the mountain to be with us, not to ascend to Heaven like angels but to be men and women on New Heavens and a New Earth.
So, I have talked a fair bit about Theology of the Cross lately without perhaps elaborating on or explaining what I meant by it. That isn’t the whole story but I think that it strikes at the heart of it. The core idea is that our target is not God in His Glory but God in His Humiliation, hence the name.
So, for news, Another Book is now live! You can purchase it from the publisher at the link below. It is showing up in various formats on Amazon and some other booksellers. Right now Amazon is showing out of stock on the paperback and a wait time on the hardcover, but you can get it instantly for your Kindle there. Westbow, the publisher, I think is shipping now, if anyone can confirm that please do. I still haven’t gotten mine yet, but when I do I will gladly send a copy if you ask. It turns out that I know absolutely nothing about books, I sort of thought that I was done once I got the publishing done but there is a whole other vista of things that I don’t know anything about. Yay, I guess.
We may have trouble defining that death but we can all feel its reality.
Ch3 of Another Book available at Westbow Press and Amazon now coming to bookstores soon.
http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/freemasonry_enlightenment.html Yes, all of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were not merely Masons but their famous teachings are explicitly Masonic. Call it what you like.
This is where the myth of progress founders and where all of the evil cabals and whatnot shipwreck. They connive and force everything into the place that they want it and the closer they get to their plans coming true the more tension that there is in the whole system until it all snaps back, somewhat the worse for wear but at least back at home.
It was a great revelation to me that if someone wants to become like Christ then they should do things that He actually did and does, not random moral or ethical observances. Chasing your wife, which His pursuit of His bride is the whole plot of the New Testament, is more Christlike than any religious thing that you can think of, which He rarely seems to have been particularly interested in.