Things of the world are important to the worldly, which is why they’re called “worldly”. Vast support structures exist to get people interested in various things of the world. Such concerns include clothing, real estate, transportation devices, wine, food, antiquities and collectibles. Since these sort of things take money, the love of it is at the root of such desires.
It is hard to have more than a few worldly concerns at one time. That’s why most of our lives, in retrospect, show our travels from one worldly interest to another in which we collect a succession of things or experiences before having moved on to others.
There is nothing of permanent importance in most of our concerns. In fact, the concerns in which we are encouraged to participate are specifically designed to distract us from things of permanent importance. The hollowness of those entranced exclusively with temporalities grows more obvious with age.
The things that attract us are similar to flypaper, the glue thereon having the power to attach our souls to dead things.
Clouds of lies.
Clouds keep sunlight from falling directly upon us. We can often see the clouds’ shadows moving toward us. From a high vantage point, we can watch their shadows move across the ground.
From a high place, we can also watch intellectual and spiritual clouds; dark shadows of lies moving across the minds of those below. Seeing them often makes us cry out, “Watch out! Your eyes are dimmed! You are blind to the awful mistakes you are making!”
We must not grow weary of that, tiring though it is. Our strength is maintained if keep ourselves alert to the tiny clouds of lies in our own minds that keep us from seeing the importance of obeying God’s command to love both Him and our neighbors.
Hating What Works.
What works: What liberals want instead:
1. Nuclear power produces electricity for about 1. Wind power, which costs $1.20/kwh, when the two cents/ kwh. It can be sold for a nickel/kwh, wind blows hard enough, about 1/3 of the time.
and everyone has plenty of clean, affordable power.
2. Stable family structures. 2. No-fault divorce.
3. Cheap fuel, pumped from naturally produced 3. Bicycles, public transportation.
hydrocarbons deep underground.
4. People who do good because they know that’s 4. Wrecking belief systems that put anything ahead of what God wants them to do. of the importance of their own desires.
5. Adapting to natural changes in temperatures, 5. Using the cycles of nature to justify more taxation and rainfall, and wind as necessary. and regulation while blaming “the rich” for every possible problem.
6. Letting people make decisions at 6. Top-down management of every possible human
the lowest possible level, the Doctrine of activity.
Subsidiarity.
7. Using proven methods of teaching reading and 7. Using the most ineffective means possible in
writing and arithmetic. order to produce intellectually helpless
populations.
8. Big Macs and whole milk, well-balanced 8. Locally-procuded Organic food that deprives the
and inexpensive sources of food. brain of vital nutrients at very high prices.
9. Meaningful, symbolic, uplifting art and 9. Meaningless, confusing claptrap.
literature.
We can better understand the common disorder of Hating What Works by considering the concept developed by the ancient Romans. They personified those who Hate What Works with their God, Dis. As Dante frequently reminds us, Dis is their God of Confusion, and has worked ever since the earliest days in The Garden to separate human beings from order.
An implication of the fact that we “are made in the image of God”.
The Book of Revelations tells us that twenty four Elders sit in thrones arranged in a circle around the Throne of God. Each Elder holds a golden bowl, full of prayers that have turned into incense. The same incense is also burned on the Altar before Him.
We are told that the prayers are those of “the saints”. Most interpreters believe that “the saints” include all believers who pray, rather than only those who’ve been officially canonized. If they are right, then we have a clue as to the relationship between this world and the one above.
One may assume that there is the same sort of relationship with requests for evil. Those requests accumulate around the personification of evil in the world below. There, curses pile up like bad smells, horrid sounds, and pain.
Just as God made angels with the freedom to reject Him, He made us with the same ability. Those who reject Him are free to produce either prayers or curses. Whichever we choose takes form in one of the two worlds beyond.
We each choose what we ask for and where those requests will go. It may help us to make the best decision if we consider that our souls will end up at the same place we’ve been piling up requests.