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- Return to Fruitfulness, that’s an Order
Return to Fruitfulness, that’s an Order
Last updated on: March 27, 2017 at 10:25 am by C. R. Wiley
Return to Fruitfulness, that’s an Order 2017-03-27T10:25:05-04:00 C. R. Wiley
Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.
By their fruits you shall know them. Matthew 7:16
The hermeneutics of suspicion have made us barren. To be expected though, since the world is structured in a particular way and disregarding its structure should make us sterile. I suppose the haters are gonna hate, and if you hate the world, why would you want to be fruitful?
The first chapter of Genesis gives us an account of the structuring of the world: God broods over the primal sea and then he applies the knife, dividing, then ordering, then naming.
I’ve never felt that the great crime of Darwin was obscuring God as the efficient cause of things, but how natural selection can be taken to imply the natural order is never settled. Further, there’s this assumption that knowing how something is made gives you license to unmake it, or refashion it, in anyway you please. Final pronouncements about meaning or goodness are all subject to revision. Nothing is fixed or finished.
Now, do the people who wish to refashion their anatomies ever really make anything? A woman who wishes to be a man denies the very meaning of the term as she vainly attempts to take on the physical attributes of a man. Manliness is not just a social construct floating cloud like above the physical world. It has a biological basis. If it didn’t, why go to the trouble of trying to make yourself look like a man?
Everything from a radical environmentalism that denies any real difference between baby pigs and baby people, and the various attempts to transcend or transform biology, are just acts of rebellion. They’re the ontological field for the bloody forces of the French Revolution. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” when it comes to the nature of things is just a return to the primal sea. (Perhaps that’s even true for politics.)
Liquid always returns to level, and that’s what we all want, right? A world without distinctions or hierarchies, where we’re equal at last, no kings, and no gods, just us chickens.
Think. Is this humility, or is it just wounded pride talking? I believe its ingratitude at least. Worse, it smacks of will to power. This cuts both ways, little girls. If will to power is all that orders the world: we’re in deep trouble.
But if it isn’t the thing that orders the world, if God orders the world, as I believe he does, we’re in worse trouble. Evil always curves back on itself. God made things that way; remember the arch of justice, it can really bend. If we imagine ourselves as brooding over a primal sea as we slice and dice our bodies we’ll mutilate them until they’re good for nothing.
There’s nothing original here, nothing fruitful, no “self-creation”, just sterility and chaos.
—
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