the mystery of faith

Though it needs to be read, few or none will read "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ perhaps the most discerning, cogent, but surely the most discouraging thing I have ever read in my life. To avoid it, though, is the sociopolitical ostrich burying his head in the sand to protect himself from the unpleasant.

The other day, someone of my generation said, We lived at the best Time, and yes, appreciate having Been, because world-wise it's all downhill from here. I have so enjoyed living into the age of rapid-fire electronic, medical, and other scientific Advancements; not necessarily Progress, mind, Advancements. But the article competently and at length explains how what is so obvious and so devastating has happened and is accelerating and cannot be corrected. For me, I'm so glad to have lived in a Time when most people were Good.

Or at least, a Time when the Good and not the bonkers-fringe set the ground rules for civilization.

Are human prospects discouraging? The essay proves Yes, beyond control, beyond hope. So discouraging that I'm starting to back off on my enjoyment of Revelation as purely a nightmare of imagination for its own Time. With the nut-fringe that I've so contemned for going up on the mountaintop to welcome Jesus, I see the sky falling after all, and can visualize a non-Future when dazed survivors emerge from the wilds of Africa and the jungles of South America, into the ruins of our do-it-yourself mass extinction event, and begin to populate anew whatever livable space they wander into.

It will be a shame, sadness on high.

Or maybe in the greater frame of things universal, it doesn't matter at all; another experiment, in our remote outpost spiral of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies where "let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them rule" didn't work out well at all: the Lord said to Satan, “Whence have you come?” Satan answered the Lord, “From going to and fro on the earth!" Indeed.

The problem? That creation, יְהִ֣י yeHEE let there be, which begins with a dot exploding into Time and Space, works by evolution, and man didn't evolve into the envisioned godly image, hadn't allowed himself Time to attain the Divine likeness, before finding himself the Divine itself and war broke out in Heaven.

" ... will come again!" I don't think so. Genesis 6:5f "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth." Vice coming again, the Son of Man will give us a miss and move on to another spiral of our Milky Way, or to a distant and unspoiled galaxy where man is not so certain of himself.

Thomas Hardy, poem Earth's Corpse

"O Lord, why grievest Thou? -

Since Life has ceased to be

Upon this globe, now cold

As lunar land and sea,

And humankind, and fowl, and fur

Are gone eternally,

All is the same to Thee as ere

They knew mortality."

"O Time," replied the Lord,

"Thou read'st me ill, I ween;

Were all THE SAME, I should not grieve

At that late earthly scene,

Now blestly past--though planned by me

With interest close and keen! -

Nay, nay: things now are NOT the same

As they have earlier been.

III

"Written indelibly

On my eternal mind

Are all the wrongs endured

By Earth's poor patient kind,

Which my too oft unconscious hand

Let enter undesigned.

No god can cancel deeds foredone,

Or thy old coils unwind!

"As when, in Noe's days,

I whelmed the plains with sea,

So at this last, when flesh

And herb but fossils be,

And, all extinct, their piteous dust

Revolves obliviously,

That I made Earth, and life, and man,

It still repenteth me!"

+++++++++++

Lamb pic pinched from The Atlantic photo gallery

Is it Time to emerge from smiley face and face reality? IDK.