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Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular
You have heard, “Life imitating art or art imitating life.” In that vein, art imitates worldview.” Even when someone says, this is his worldview, his art may contradict what he says is his worldview. The art or his aesthetic is a better or more accurate expression of his worldview than other means of expressing it.
You could see what was important to Jesus by His reaction to the corrupting of the temple, His Father’s house. When someone blows his top because you dinged his car, that says something about the priority of his car, more than if you asked him. A person’s music has that way of explaining the meaning of a person’s life.
Worship of and Love for God
One biblical and historical element of worship of God is music. The Bible is full of music. Worship is an offering to God. God regulates the offering. It must be what God wants for Him to accept it.
Someone said, “You are what (or who) you worship.” Whatever you give God, that’s what you think about Him. If you give that to Him, then that expresses who you are, as much as it does who God is.
You can say you love God, like you can say you know God. If you don’t do what He says, you neither love Him or know Him, which overlap. The love shines through what you offer. It is like giving God the present you wanted, not what He did. You love yourself.
The “life imitating art” part of the equation says that art affects life. Life changes by the art influencing it. A person especially changes by the thoughts expressed about God through the music offered God.
The Meaning
What I have written assumes that art means something. It also says that art itself is not subjective and personal. Scripture says this, when it says that God is worshiped in the beauty of His holiness.
Beauty, which relates to aesthetics or art, is not in the eye of the beholder. It is objective in its meaning. Holiness is beautiful. That would mean that the unholy is not beautiful. Everything is not beautiful in its own way. Some is beautiful and some is not.
God separates from what falls short of the perfections of His attributes. That is the holiness of God. God will not receive as worship what falls short of His attributes. He separates from that as characteristic of His nature.
Bifurcation of Beauty
How is it that today churches do offer God the profane, that is, what conflicts with His attributes? Churches bifurcate beauty, just like they do with truth. They separated the spiritual or sacred from the natural or secular. Like there is total truth, one truth like one God, there is total beauty.
Churches and their leaders (or perhaps the leaders just pander to the people) went along with the split. They regarded and treated spiritual things as sentimental and emotional, not on the same plain as the natural and the secular. Church is an escape from the real world.
The music offers that escape and that feeling, which lifts someone emotionally, and is seen as a sacred or spiritual experience with God. That’s what church does as its most essential. People leave with a skip in their step, ready to go in the real world, the secular one, even thinking it was God.
Some churches and their leaders would disagree they do what I described in the previous paragraph. They explain it as something different, so removed from what occurred, because now that is the norm for a church. It’s been done so long, it’s just church now. It follows the trajectory of a revision of true worship, not true worship.
A church with corrupt music and worship doesn’t see its art as negative or corrupted. That is instead something profane to the extreme like a Mapplethorpe exhibit of a crucifix in a jar of urine, pushed by the National Endowment of Arts in the late 1980s. Certain extreme or exotic modern or even postmodern forms, those are wrong. Not the profanity churches now perform and consider worship.
Tell-Tale
Without the church doing much to anything to help it, the world’s culture has decayed. Churches veered off objective beauty, or one beauty. Something is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is not related to secular or spiritual or even sacred.
Music isn’t sacred because it is used in the church; it is sacred because it is sacred. That also means it is beautiful, because, again, beauty relates to the glory of the Lord. A corruption of beauty, used in worship in the church, does not become beautiful by a church using it, what some today call, “redeeming” it.
The music someone plays and enjoys, and especially for someone who says he is a Christian, by that you can tell who he is. I know some of you readers hate that. You deny it sharply and often angrily. The reasons for the heat also help explain what is happening.
It is easy today for professing Christians to stand up against decadent culture. They can point out what’s very horrible in bad books in schools and their curriculum. Meanwhile, their churches are decaying at perhaps a little slower pace but a continuous one that isn’t far behind the world.
What is light and easy, sentimental and emotional, and entertaining also sells. Salzburg and Vienna and the rest of Europe went for Mozart’s music because of the former, the light and easy, etc. His dad Leopold, however, liked the selling part of it. It wasn’t lost on the religious leaders that Mozart also boosted their prominence and position.
Church Consumers
Entertainment, Not Worship
Church attenders become consumers, which is the opposite of worship. They also confuse that feeling from true spirituality. It doesn’t matter, because that feeling and spirituality are on the same plain. When the congregants leave their meeting, they take that experience as preparation for the real world. That’s also now constituted as God. The people think they’ve associated with God because it is indistinguishable from Him. It is actually more aligned with the world they enter after their assembling ends.
Even Baptist meetings have long encouraged the decadence of consumerism. They entertain a crowd. The feeling is an apparent sanctified one, which is a lie. The one who does this the best, a kind of circus-master, is a wanted commodity. It or he improves the spirit of the meeting, again this superficial, sentimental emotionalism. God is using his talent. Most cannot resist the popularity of it. It is its own pop music.
How could churches permit a philosophy in conflict with God? Some don’t judge music. Even though arts are full of meaning, they relegate it to meaninglessness. It is in this meaningless realm of spirituality, not like what occurs where there is meaning, eight to five, a real life. Many also judge against the extreme and deem themselves better by comparison.
Loss of Discernment
Young people in church often feel left out. If they get this music, it at least might connect them to the real world. This is the acquiescence to youth culture. Their hormones are raging and they chafe under parental authority. They look happier and parents think the church succeeds at keeping them. Its young people are happy. At least they can smile to the rhythm, the feeling, and the allurement.
Churches lose their discernment, described in a biblical way as unable to distinguish the holy from the profane. It occurs through incrementalism. Men won’t separate from it. They won’t say no to it. It gets worse and then doesn’t stop getting worse. To explain it requires something more than a thirty second sound byte. Even if you can, the Bible doesn’t have a play button to give the kind of proof necessary for such diminished discernment.
Country music or Country Western arose in church settings. It grew among church going young people in the Bible belt. They took the sentimentality and feelings that corresponded to the bifurcation of beauty in the church. Country western stars, who began in church, brought a more intense version of it to the world. It produced an even more extreme response.
Holy and Profane
Ryman Auditorium, the temple of country music, looks like a church building. It gives people, especially young ones, that feeling they had at church, making their experience in the world indistinguishable from church. The entertainers at church just do a lesser version of the same thing. This contrasts with Ezekiel 44:23:
And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.
The country stars were good at country music. What started in church succeeded in the world. The success in the world, more excessive in its effect, travelled back to the church. The church accepts it, because that’s the domain of the spiritual.
To Be Continued
King Arthur and the Reality Of and Belief In the Supernatural: A Paradigm for Bifurcation of Truth
Part One
The Story of King Arthur
If you were like me, you heard the story of King Arthur and his Round Table as a child. The archaeologist Nowell Myers wrote: “No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.” I understand someone using his life to chase down this story. In the United States, journalists and historians both speak of the Kennedy era as Camelot. It insinuates a metaphor of utopianism.
When I read, heard, or saw the tale of King Arthur, I wondered if he was real. I wouldn’t have agreed the fanciful aspects of the Arthur story were true. Was he a true character though or just legend like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox? The extraordinary figures, like Merlin, and magical qualities did not extinguish the wonder, rather enhanced it.
How does someone leap from the imaginations of the supernatural and yet inquire of the historical? The two seem to contradict. Do they? Supernatural and historical?
I would speculate that the Arthur saga disappears without human vulnerability to paranormal intervention. Normal doesn’t explain a planet hanging in space with the beauty and complexity of earth. The imagination of the human mind takes a trajectory into the supernatural. Man knows God. This is his default position.
Carlisle Castle
My wife and I have lived for a few months in the Northern England city of Carlisle. Saturday we walked around and through Carlisle Castle. We left the castle to return on foot to our flat, a small studio apartment, but we stopped along the way into the lobby of Tullie House Museum.
During the English Civil War, royalists occupied Carlisle Castle under the command of Sir Thomas Glemham. From October 1644 to June 1645, the Scots besieged the castle under Major General Sir David Leslie. The battles fought in the Civil War included Scottish Covenanters. Isaac Tully was in Carlisle the whole time and he wrote in his diary a journal of the siege now possessed by the British Museum in what are called the Harley Manuscripts. Isaac Tully’s family, who built the Tullie House in Carlisle, was a member of the merchant guild.
Carlisle Castle and Tullie House Museum dovetail at this siege during the English Civil War. Hundreds of years later my wife and I walked into both. As we passed through the lobby of Tullie House, we noticed an exhibition beginning there on February 4 on the The Legend of King Arthur. My mind raced back to my childhood.
Arthur at Tullie House
Apparently, one tale in the King Arthur story relates to Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, a Middle English rhyme written about 1400. Middle English is the very difficult English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written at a similar time. This early English poem features Sir Gawain, the apparent nephew of King Arthur and an English knight of the Round Table. This permits the city of Carlisle to claim King Arthur as its own and motivates it to feature an exhibition with his name.
The main museum leadership stood in the lobby last Saturday at about 4:30pm. I asked the two older men and woman whether Arthur originated in Carlisle. A conversation ensued for five to ten minutes. One of the men smiled and said several English towns or cities claim King Arthur. I asked, “Is he real?” All three laughed, while knowingly looking to each other. The other man said, “Come to the exhibition!” The woman answered, that was a difficult explanation.
Supernatural
I told the three museum employees that I thought it was interesting that some or many think about a historical derivation to the story and yet it includes the supernatural in it. All three of them just stood and stared in silence. No. Comment. What turned them from very talkative and engaged to frozen incapability to reply? I said the one word, “Supernatural.” They smiled in silence and I smiled back with a small laugh. I laughed because I knew why they said nothing in reply.
Continuing, I said something like the following: “The instinct for the supernatural in these stories complements the understanding of the supernatural in the world that they see. They know all this, as complex as it is, didn’t take place by accident. It is not a natural only world.” The three still just stood and smiled with no comment. It is a government funded museum and exhibit.
If the three museum workers showed agreement even by nodding “yes,” then as government employees, they use their positions to confirm the supernatural. Nothing supernatural can be a fact. I would enjoy even a minimal philosophical agreement that, even if not themselves, others enjoy the supernatural element of the King Arthur narrative, mirroring what they accept in the real world.
Two Other Examples of Shunning the Spiritual, Supernatural, Religious, or Biblical
York
This experience reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to York earlier, where we walked into a shop in the Shambles there. Something on a sign in the shop mentioned ghosts. The two young ladies said the shop was haunted and talked of a few experiences of validation. So I asked them, “So you believe in the supernatural?” I continued, “This is not just a physical world. There are spiritual beings. It is more than just a natural world.” I stood waiting for an answer, and they stood staring at me.
Castle Gift Shop
Before we walked home from the castle, passing through the lobby of the Tullie house, my wife and I stopped one more time into the castle shop. It is an English Heritage site and has a large assortment of items to purchase. In one of the two rooms, bottles of alcoholic beverage filled several shelves to buy. On a small table, three bottles sat and a young man said that today they offered some for a sample. Two were alcoholic. One was not.
My wife and I sampled the non-alcoholic beverage, a Ginger flavored one. Though non-alcoholic, it was intended, he informed us, to give the same kind of initial kick that alcohol gives. He said that the company started during the days of the temperance movement in England, which continued today selling these non-alcoholic type drinks. I mentioned to him that the United States had a period of prohibition of alcohol. He knew about it.
I began explaining to him why the prohibition movement started in the United States and referred him to the Ken Burns three part documentary on the Prohibition. He wrote it down. I told him that in part the prohibition occurred for biblical reasons. Before he answered me, he put his hand over the English Heritage Site logo on his shirt, warned us that this was not the opinion of his employers, and then he commented on the temperance movement in the United Kingdom. He felt the pressure to offer a disclaimer that was nothing more than a historical observation, because of its thread-like proximity to something scriptural.
Bifurcation of Truth
What I am illustrating is the real-life bifurcation of truth in the world. People segregate the spiritual from the physical. They divide the natural from the supernatural. They treat the Bible and anything religious as distant from facts and even history. Few to none will make mention of it.
I would expect little different in the United States to what I’m describing in England. A vast majority of people relegate the truth, if it is in the Bible or if it is moral or even religious, to a different category of information. They would not call it knowledge. They see it as a matter of faith, which is relativistic, individual, private, and subjective.
Employees in public institutions in a widespread manner, almost exclusively, will not talk about anything even related to the supernatural in a public setting. I will often mention the Bible. I did not even do that in this instance. That alone brought total silence.
Post Enlightenment Dualism
Previous to the Enlightenment, no divide existed between the natural and the spiritual, a rebellious invention of human derivation. Both proceeded from a single mind, consolidated in a unified whole. Man reflected the image of God, which also fulfilled his purpose. This is also the truth about man. He is not the product of an accident of nature.
Modern science arose from believers in God, who saw His invisible hand in all matter and space. The arrangement of the parts with mathematical precision turned to a conception of a machine with its varied innerworkings, contraptions, and mechanisms. The body functioned according to scientific laws with the mind regarded as operating as an independent entity. The concession to man as mere device gave way to everything no longer the design of a Creator.
The recalculation of man as outgrowth of natural causes did not occur solely by rationalistic determinations. Man wants what he wants. To get it, he eliminates God, a final judge, to stop him from getting what he wants or judging him for wanting it. What I describe, however, is the means by which people discarded God for their own lust. His inclusion in a conversation interrupts their self-approval and personal autonomy and violates their conscience. As a feature of their fallenness, they avoid that conversation with its awkwardness, painfulness, anxiety, or anger.
The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence
Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.
Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.
The Truth, the Logos
When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.
The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.
God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.
Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.
People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.
No Bifurcation of Truth
Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.
This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.
Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.
Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.
Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts
The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.
Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.
Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.
Total Truth
For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.
A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.
The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.
The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.
Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building
For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.
Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.
God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.
The Two Story View of Truth and Gender Identity: Matt Walsh on Dr. Phil
A conservative commentator, who works with and on Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s new media company, showed up for the Dr. Phil show with two transgenders (the term “non-binary” was used). This interaction has been big on the world wide web. I didn’t hear about it until today, even as I write this. I know who Dr. Phil is, but I’ve never seen his show. I only heard of Matt Walsh, because I’ve seen him on the roster for Daily Wire.
I did know that Walsh had written a children’s book, Johnny the Walrus, to help parents with the gender identity issue with their children. It became a bestseller at Amazon and in particular with LGBTQ, which became a kind of joke for Walsh, bragging that his book might show up in the LGBTQ category.
Walsh, I can see, has now become a unique target for leftists, because he wrote Johnny the Walrus and he showed up on Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil had on his show these two transgenders, who are “married,” it seems, then a pro-transgender professor, two different parents, a mother and father, who both don’t want this taught to their children in school, and finally Matt Walsh.
Everyone was “nice” to the transgenders except for Walsh. It’s not that Walsh wasn’t nice. He was just truthful in a matter-of-fact, unapologetic kind of way. Others insulted Walsh at will, while he insulted no one. Walsh took the position essentially everyone not long ago would have agreed.
GENDER
1. Properly; kind; sort; [obs.] 2. A sex, male or female.—3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives, and participles, to express the distinction of male and female.
Gender being “the distinction of sex,” it follows, of course, that, as there are but two sexes, there can be but two genders. . . . Masculine means, not male, but pertaining to a male. Feminine means, not female, but pertaining to a female.
DIVINE DISTINCTIONS AND REBELLION
On this biological difference we construct an edifice of social attitudes and assumptions, behaviours and activities: these are our gender roles and identities. . . . Unlike sex, gender roles are variable.
What Is the Primary Cause of Division in the United States?
Our country is divided. Many say it is more divided than any time since the Civil War. Most of you readers live here, so this is no surprise to you. Many articles and even whole books have been written in the last decade on the division in the United States, but the present situation provoked some to write in the last month on the subject. The following paragraph represents writing in the last month on severe division in America.
The City Journal published an article by Andrew Klavan, titled, “At the Heart of Our Divisions.” Klavan, part of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, tries to explain the division as others have. Newsweek reports that a “Majority of Trump Voters Want to Split the Nation Into ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Halves.” The Las Vegas Sun reported it this way:
A new political poll offers an alarming look at the state of American unity and our population’s respect for some of the nation’s core values.
The poll, conducted by the University of Virginia’s nonprofit Center for Politics, shows that 52% of respondents who voted for former President Donald Trump were in favor of splitting the country into red and blue states, while 41% of voters for President Joe Biden agree with the idea. More than 2,000 voters participated in the poll, nearly equally divided between those supporting Trump and Biden.
Ed Kilgore at The Intelligencer, part of New York Magazine, writes, “No, We Can’t Get a National Divorce There’s growing sentiment for secession, particularly on the right. It should be rejected.” At Substack, Claremont senior fellow David Reaboi writes, “National Divorce Is Expensive, But It’s Worth Every Penny.” Karol Markowicz writes at the New York Post, “Sorry, but a national split up just won’t work.” Steven Malanga at the City Journal writes, “The New Secession Movement.” Conservative commentator Rich Lowry writes at Politico of all places, “A Surprising Share of Americans Wants to Break Up the Country. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.” Dan Rodricks writes at the Baltimore Sun, “Civil war unlikely, but the nation’s present course could still be disastrous.” Most of these were written in the last week, and there are more.
Okay, so there’s division. Everyone can agree with that. Putin of Russia and Xi of China smile. Why though? I’ve read or heard a lot of different reasons: media, tribalism, the education system, the deep state, and more. Klavan lists reasons in the first paragraph of his post. Those are typical, whole books written about them, but I believe these are surface reasons, I would call, non-worldview reasons, that are superficial and don’t dig deep enough.
My take on the acute and bitter division between states, people, and parties in the United States, I want to give credit, corresponds to something Nancy Pearcey writes about in her book, Total Truth. She explains a division portrayed by the lower and upper stories of a building or house with the lower story being “facts” and the upper story being “values.” Today you hear a lot about facts in the media, news, and schools. This is the “science is real” at the top of the leftist value sign. In this upper and lower story bifurcation, values are probably not what you think they are. Let me explain.
God is One. Truth, which proceeds from God, is also one. Pearcey’s proposition is “total truth,” the title of her book. There are not two stories that treat facts different than values, where values are constructed, personal and subjective. You can’t really know these with certainty. No, with God His natural laws, facts or science, are no different than moral laws. If you fall from the edge of a cliff, gravity sends you down to destruction. Breaking moral laws also destroys. Worse even. God is the Author of both.
Premoderns took a transcendent view of the world. Truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals, all related to God. God transcending the world is the basis of the transcendentals. He’s not part of the world. He created it and having created it, He is separate from it. As James 1 says, that with God there is no shadow of turning. God is holy. He is Self-existent and immutable. Nothing affects Him. All meaning comes from God, so truth, goodness, and beauty, the transcendentals, are objective.
This world is God’s world. Even if someone doesn’t believe in God, they are living in His world. This is reality. The division breaks down into those who live in reality, recognition that this world functions according to laws according to which everyone must live, even if they reject the God of the Bible, and then those who don’t live in reality.
The ones not living in reality, which are one side of the division in the United States, see the top story, values, how they want to see them. It’s one reason they are called “values,” and not “morals” or “moral laws.” Using “values” is using language with power. Incidentally, part of critical theory is perfecting this language for use in reconstructing reality.
Looking at the world like two sides of the campus, religion, art, etc. on one side and then science, math, and engineering on the other, the blue part of the country thinks they can assign their own meaning on one side of the campus. They ultimately don’t want God in charge. They don’t want objective values that clash with what they want, so they make up their own and dismiss God or make up their own god that approves of their values. This is the basis for the Democrat party booing God when voting on their political platform in 2012. This is also how they justify killing babies.
The truth is that the blue states, people, etc. now assign their own meaning to science as well. They call it science like hanging out a shingle, pulling science out of a Cracker Jack box. Their subjectivity on the upper story, think of it as bad plumbing, has burst through into the lower story like a broken pipe. That side can’t tell you that a girl is a girl. This is one reason why many don’t want to go to college in this country anymore. They know it’s a racket that is not living in reality.
One side of the division in the country wants the nation to be called like it really is. Borders are representative of this. You can’t be a nation when you don’t protect, not just protect — how about acknowledge that you have a border. Whatever one thinks about the virus and masks and the vaccination, it’s understandable why a big chunk of the country doesn’t trust authority on this. I’m not going to even get into what Fauci has said. He doesn’t speak science and this is demonstrative on multiple occasions.
The government, the media that supports it, and now even corporations are all in on the lies. They allot whatever meaning they want and they expect you to receive it. If you don’t, now they’ll even prosecute you. They’ll fire you. If you don’t put on their particular pin, which supports whatever lie that they deem correct, you might lose your job.
I believe most churches too have succumbed to the two stories I’ve described. They put beauty, music, dress in the personal, the subjective, the top story. They capitulate on basic doctrine and practice to accommodate for popularity and numbers. Their targets see the world according to the lie of these two stories. They know it and they concede to it. This does not bode well for the country. Even if the nation does split into two parts, what will happen to the red side when the churches have taken the same basic approach to truth? This is the most fundamental aspect of worldliness in churches today.
Another metaphor to demonstrate what the division of truth, the two story view, does to the country is a rudderless ship. The country has no certain belief to hold it together or to give it direction. It moves according to whatever current or wind produced by the world, like a float or a bob on an aimless sea. The force of popularity, what scripture would call lust, the combined desires of the population, decides what is it’s truth, it’s goodness, and it’s beauty, whatever each of these is in their own eyes.
Everything above explains the division in the country. Maybe the next question is, what is the solution to this division? That, my friend, is much more difficult.
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