day no. 17,391: inflicting pleasure (and the threat of pain)

"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

You can create blindness by turning the lights in the room off or by flooding the room with light. Orwell worried that Big Brother would have his finger on the off switch, Huxley worried that we would add more lights and get rid of the switch. Either way, distinction and differentiation are obliterated. Orwell imagined a society starved for meaning whereas Huxley imagined a society so full of crap that it could not fit a bite of meaning into it. Orwell assumed the tyranny would come from without, Huxley predicted the tyranny would come from within. Orwell imagined the threat of pain would be the best weapon whereas Huxley's imaginative powers wielded pleasure. The one was the desire for satisfaction and the other was the burden of over saturation. 

day no. 17,390: the first shall be sassed

Proverbs 18:17

The one who states his case first seems right, 

until the other comes and examines him.

The one who quotes Proverbs 18:17 first seems to have the moral high ground...

day no. 17,389: free to give and costly to get back

"Freedom is already being lost in a network of police prohibition... English liberty may well be entirely lost. I should not write this if I did not think that it may also be saved. But I could not write it without recording my own conviction that there is only one way of saving it." ― G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1920)

Freedom can be freely given away, but it cannot be taken back that way. 

Galatians 5:1

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

If you have been set free, you must resist the temptation to use your freedom to enslave yourself. Freedom is full of responsibility and that can be a heavy burden to carry, so heavy that some opt for the weight of chains. They prefer bondage and endless bureaucracy to the weight of personal responsibility and endless liberty.

John 10:9

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

When attempt to break yourself free from the kingdom of Christ, you break away from the kingdom of freedom. You do not find open prairie beyond the fence, you find the abyss. Inside the fence through the narrow gate, there is space to play, but outside the gate and beyond the fence is only the void.

"We have lost our national instincts because we have lost the idea of that Christendom from which the nations came. In freeing ourselves from Christianity, we have only freed ourselves from freedom. We shall not now return to a merely heathen hilarity, for the new heathenism is anything but hilarious." ― G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1920)

There is no heathen hilarity waiting to embrace those who adopt a libertarian pipe dream. There is no freedom at the end of the road of every man doing what is right in his own eyes. You do not get Heaven on earth like that, you get the book of Judges. If we are to be free, we must return to Freedom. He is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father or to freedom but through Him. Getting back to Christ will cost us a lot. Not just something, but everything. And if we are not willing to give up whatever gains we imagine we have found without Him, we will never get back to the font of freedom that gave us the freedom in the first place.

day no. 17,388: satire and society

"It may be that the modern world has outstripped satire." ― G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1920)

Over 100 years ago, Chesterton worried that the world had robbed us of satire. If he thought that about that world, imagine what he would think about ours. It is nearly impossible to outcrazy the crazies. You can invent the most absurd scenario only to discover that it is currently being used as a curriculum on a major university campus somewhere. You can try to flex your hyperbole muscles, only to have a trip to Wal-Mart show you how weak minded your exaggeration exercises have been.

Satire assumes a center. It requires a generally accepted standard. In that way, satire is a lot like society. Without widely agreed upon norms, you cannot satirize anything and you cannot have a functioning society. The punchlines only work when you can provide an unexpected outcome. When the unusual becomes the expected, it ruins the ability to surprise you. Insanity is humorless. It is no joke. It refuses to join in with laughter and instead passes legislation to make mockery a hate crime.

day no. 17,387: three hundred eighteen

Genesis 14:14

When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, 318 of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

Abram had 318 men ready to rock n roll. He did not have to scramble when the crap hit the fan. He had planned ahead. He had men he had trained. He had equipped them for the catastrophe so that when it came, he called up the troops. He did not have a standing army and he did not have a castrated crew. He trained them and trusted them not to use their skills against him and he trusted the Lord enough not to keep a corps on constant standby.

*as an interesting historical side note, the traditionally accepted number of bishops who attended the First Council of Nicaea is 318. That may be a simple historical oddity or coincidence, but it is a striking one. 318 is an interesting number. It is interesting in that it is so specific and yet not immediately associated with anything else. That is, until the Council of Nicaea. It will forever live rent free in my mind as a correlation. The one will always make the think of the other. Trained men ready to rock n roll defending the deity of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. 

day no. 17,386: cannibals or cousins?

“Christmas is utterly unsuited to the modern world. It presupposes the possibility of families being united, or reunited, and even of the men and women who chose each other being on speaking terms. Thus thousands of young adventurous spirits, ready to face the facts of human life, and encounter the vast variety of men and women as they really are, ready to fly to the ends of the earth and tolerate every alien or accidental quality in cannibals or devil-worshippers, are cruelly forced to face an hour, nay sometimes even two hours, in the society of Uncle George; or some aunt from Cheltenham whom they don't particularly like. Such abominable tortures cannot be tolerated in a time like ours…It is intolerable that such sensibility should suffer the shock of the unexpected appearance of her own mother, or possibly her own child. It was never supposed that Parents were included in the great democratic abstraction called People. It was never supposed that brotherhood could extend to brothers.” ― G.K. Chesterton

The embittered consider the cannibalism of a stranger more endurable than the politics of a parents. They would rather come face to face with a devil worshiping foreigner than have any face time with a boring relative.

"If all cultures are equal, then cannibalism is just a matter of culinary taste." — Léo Strauss

Where Christ is not obeyed, the cannibalistic butchery of the barbarian can be tolerated, but the antiquated customs of your cousin cannot. In some exceptional cases, cannibalism may even be adopted by some as a way of trying to take the bite out of the whole situation.

Galatians 5:15

If ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.

Some people would rather run the risk of chewing others up for the chance of getting to chew others out. They'd rather be friends with those who consume men than be friendly to those men God has called their brothers. But the best measure of a man is not his ability to get along with those he has to travel a long way to meet, it is his willingness to get along with those he has to travel home to see again.

"The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born." ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

All of our neighbors were once strangers, including our parents. We do not prove our mettle by finding new strangers to admire, but by finding new ways to admire old friends.

"When we step into a family, we step into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy tale." ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

We can choose our surroundings, but God chooses our foundings. Everyone is born into something somewhere. Everyone belongs to someone and owes someone something. We must love our neighbors as ourselves which in this case means realizing that they may feel just as stuck with you as you feel you are with them.

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.” ― G.K. Chesterton

It is easy to get along with people you share nothing in common with. Getting along in that case is easy, it costs you nothing. They don't need anything from you and demand nothing from you. You have no obligation to any of them and they do not owe you anything. The fact that you don't share anything in common means you have less to fight over because neither of you want the same thing.

"In a world of increasing disconnectedness, the very act of gathering together at Christmas is an act of defiance." ― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire

In the end, it will be Christ or chaos. There will be connection in Christ and there will be disconnectedness outside of Him. As the world around us chases chaos, we must gather around Christ. This includes coming together for Christmas. We are at war with the world and one family sitting around home with one prayer before one meal is a nuclear family bomb. It is devastating to those who bow before devastation.

day no. 17,385: back when the pagans were orthodox

"The England of the 17th century was so saturated with Biblical, Puritanical, Protestant theology, that everybody was orthodox, even the pagans." — Douglas Wilson, Plodcast #426: Why Aren't More People In Jail

The pagans of yesteryear were more orthodox than the professing Christians of many in our day. Christendom had so saturated the world in 17th century England that the most reprobate sinner knew his catechism. He knew what he was rejecting and he knew that he was rejecting it. He did not reject the existence of God or His claim over him per se, he rejected his duty to obey Him. He did not dispute the duty, he simply failed to fulfill it. This is not a better situation for the unconverted per se, at least not eternally, but it is a better situation for society in general and arguably better for even the unconverted in the meantime as it provided the option of repenting of their unrepentance.

"Everybody was ostensibly a cultural Christian. Almost all of them had been baptized in infancy into the church. But the Reformation had been so thorough and so widespread that everybody knew the categories: these are the converted people and these are the unconverted people... In these days, it appears from how Baxter talks to them that he is fully expecting the unconverted to identify themselves as unconverted: 'Yes, I'm a Christian. Yes, I'm baptized. Yes, I go to church. And Yes, I'm unconverted." — Douglas Wilson, Plodcast #426: Why Aren't More People In Jail

Christendom does not guarantee that everyone will be Christian in the sense that they will go to Heaven when they die, but it doe guarantee that everyone will be Christian in the sense that they will belong to the visible church and have to break with it in the invisible recesses of their heart. It required an honest rejection of the claims of Christ without rejecting His right to claim them.

Oh, that we may once again live in a land where the most unconverted neighbor is conversant in the catechisms. This brings the weight of the law to bear on everyone, even those who do not claim to worship its Giver. This is Calvin's second use of the law with it acting as a restraint or a deterrent to the behavior of those who were not believers, and whose depravity could otherwise manifest into all manner of lawlessness. Those who oppose Christian Nationalism on Christian grounds are depriving pagans of their opportunity to be better men.

They shall come mild as monkish clerks,

With many a scroll and pen;

And backward shall ye turn and gaze,

Desiring one of Alfred's days,

When pagans still were men.

— G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

Unbelievers and believers used to have more in common. Pagans knew enough to know that they were looking for answers. In that, they and the Christians agreed. Life had a meaning somewhere out there and we are all obligated to obey whoever it turned out to be and whatever it is they wanted from us. They disagreed as to who or what it was, but agreed on the premise that there must be a who and a what in order for everything else to hold together.

C.S Lewis' Christmas Sermon for Pagans emphasizes the same sentiment as Chesterton does here. Give me a good ol' fashioned pagan any day compared to what we have now. The intelligentsia of the enlightened modern man refuses to look up for answers. While the old fashioned unbelievers saw animals in the stars, they at least were looking in the right direction. Modern unbelief doesn't only refuse to believe in the one, true God, but fails to believe or take the time to consciously concoct an alternative. That doesn't mean they don't have a belief system, but highlights the fact that they don't know that they even hold to one.

"The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas." — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

The problem with modern man isn't that he has become modern, but that he is no longer a man.