https://justabovesunset.wordpress.com/2020/09/25/eschatology-for-dummies/?unapproved=90461&moderation-hash=d81a097bd9787f5cc67171af8232227c#comment-90461
Eschatology for Dummies
Posted on September 25, 2020by Alan
We live in apocalyptic end-of-the-world times – but we always live in apocalyptic end-of-the-world times. That’s just how we think. Maybe we’re all just drama queens, fighting our quite ordinary and cyclical rather meaningless troubles by pretending they are existentially dire and thus the most important thing ever. We did that with the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks – a core group of a few thousand nasty fanatics were the greatest threat we ever faced, greater than the Nazis and the Japanese in the forties, taking over much of the world with all their massive armies – thirty or forty thousand guys at best – a far greater than the threat posed by the Soviets during all the long years of the Cold War, with their tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that could easily end all life on earth. Yep, all that was awful, but this al-Qaeda business was the real thing, finally.
rogerglewis says:
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September 25, 2020 at 11:46 pm
Hello Alan,
I have not read you in a while, I did quite a lot during the 2016 election cycle, I enjoyed your style then and enjoyed this too.
On Trump and Hitlerian characteristics, I always felt Mussolini was nearer the mark.
Wodehouse’s Spode v Trump
As this piece is about Eschatology perhaps we could leave Reichstag fires and Big Lies for another day but not without first a little Diocletian.
Diocletian’s
Problem-Reaction-Solution
A further example of how elites throughout history commit acts of terrorism as a pretext to create enemies and corral populations behind a tyrannical agenda
By Paul Joseph Watson
https://notthegrubstreetjournal.com/2017/05/24/manchester-terror-attack-a-reichstag-fire-moment-for-mrs-may/
Unconditional Election
Unconditional Election is the doctrine which states that God chose those whom he was pleased to bring to a knowledge of himself, not based upon any merit shown by the object of his grace and not based upon his looking forward to discover who would “accept” the offer of the gospel. God has elected, based solely upon the counsel of his own will, some for glory and others for damnation (Romans 9:15,21). He has done this act before the foundations of the world (Ephesians 1:4-8). This doctrine does not rule out, however, man’s responsibility to believe in the redeeming work of God the Son (John 3:16-18). Scripture presents a tension between God’s sovereignty in salvation, and man’s responsibility to believe which it does not try to resolve. Both are true — to deny man’s responsibility is to affirm an unbiblical hyper-calvinism; to deny God’s sovereignty is to affirm an unbiblical Arminianism. The elect are saved unto good works (Ephesians 2:10). Thus, though good works will never bridge the gulf between man and God that was formed in the Fall, good works are a result of God’s saving grace. This is what Peter means when he admonishes the Christian reader to make his “calling” and “election” sure (2 Peter 1:10). Bearing the fruit of good works is an indication that God has sown seeds of grace in fertile soil.
Essentially Alan,
The Narratives of Dystopian solutions to the problematic Determinstic inherent badness of man
play on Eschatological rhetoric to divide and rule.
Pelagius for me says it best
“We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. … If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man’s status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived.”
Pelagius
https://notthegrubstreetjournal.com/2018/04/12/mans-status-is-better-and-higher-for-the-very-reason-for-which-it-is-thought-to-be-inferior-pelagius/
Western
philosophy, after all, really begins with the quarrel between Heraclitus and
Parmenides; a quarrel that Parmenides won. As a result, from almost the very start,
the Western tradition marked itself by imagining objects that exist, as it were, outside
of time and transformation. So much so that the obvious reality of change has always
been something of a problem.
It might be useful to review that quarrel, however quickly.
https://notthegrubstreetjournal.com/2020/03/19/unintended-consequences-plausible-deniability-precautionary-principle-synchronicity-plandemic-curiousconjunction-or-genuinelyfake-cronycapitaliustvirus2020-davidgraeber-financialeyes-joeb/
